Meet the woman who makes a living taste-testing chocolate for a $33 billion candy company

Mars

Lisa Schroeder has a pretty sweet job.

For the past 16 years, Schroeder has worked for Mars Chocolate — a segment of the $33 billion Mars candy, petcare, and beverage company. Mars Chocolate produces 29 candy brands in total, including the billion-dollar global brands M&M's, Snickers, Dove, Milky Way, and Twix.

As a sensory technologist for the company, Schroeder's job is to taste-test chocolate. We recently spoke to her to find out how she landed this dream job, what she does all day, and what advice she has for aspiring taste testers. 

Here's what she had to say:

Schroeder's path to becoming a taste tester was anything but traditional.

After high school, Schroeder went to the Katharine Gibbs secretarial school in Montclair, New Jersey, where she majored in advanced secretarial studies.

She went on to work in a variety of administrative support roles while raising her children. Then, in 2000, she heard about the taste panel at Mars from a neighbor who worked for the company.

"When the opportunity to apply to become a taste tester presented itself I jumped at the chance," she recalls. "I never thought about working with food when I was growing up, but I have always loved chocolate. Some of my earliest and cherished childhood memories are of my mother and I snuggling on the couch with a bowl of M&Ms between us while we watched television."

She says her background and journey to where she is today "was definitely not the traditional route of getting a job in research and development."

When Schroeder joined Mars in 2000, she had no food science experience — but luckily for her, "your educational background really has no bearing on your ability to taste," she explains.

Despite not having any prior experience with taste-testing, she decided to go for the job.

"I couldn't pass up the opportunity to taste chocolate for a living," Schroeder says. 

The first step of the hiring process is to fill out a screener, which asks questions to find out how you describe food and your experience with tasting food.

"Taste testers are hired based upon their ability to identify and describe flavor, basic tastes, and textures — not their educational background," she explains.

Next, there's an in-person screener and interview, where they test you on basic tastes and further test your ability to use descriptive language.

"Once you're selected as a taste tester, you go through a six-month intensive training program to learn how to become a Mars taste tester."

Schroeder says her four years of experience as a descriptive panelist — also known as a taste tester — was "one of the best educations I could have received in preparation for joining the sensory team here at Mars."

After four years taste-testing chocolate, she was promoted to a sensory technician role.

After spending four years as a chocolate taste tester, Schroeder was offered a sensory technician role for the company's Hackettstown, New Jersey plant, where Mars makes half of the country's M&M's.

"In my current role, I am responsible for training and leading the descriptive analysis panel, which is our panel of trained taste testers who gather data to help maintain the quality of our products. This program makes sure that our most loved brands — such as M&M's — taste the same as they did 75 years ago and that our new products taste like our consumers would expect. Consistent quality is an important principle for Mars," she explains.

Schroeder says there are only four descriptive panels like this around the world.

"Mars Chocolate has given me the opportunity to travel nationally and globally to share best practices, helping to ensure that wherever around the world you taste a Mars Chocolate product, the quality and experience are just the same."

In addition to running and training tasting panels, she also recruits Mars' taste testers, and collaborates regularly with sensory scientists. 

"I don't think my job is a dream job. I know it is."