Growing with Picnic: from intern to expert

In the second year of my Master’s degree, I thought it would be an interesting experience to do an internship at Picnic for six months to gain some experience before my graduation… I never left.

When I started as an intern in early 2016, there were only thirty people to meet. From day one I got lots of responsibilities in the fulfilment team. We were very busy every day to make sure the few hundred customers we had at the time got their groceries at home. That sounds a lot easier than it was, we were growing very rapidly and with every growth spurt, we got new challenges to tackle. It was amazing to solve issues on my own, and it was very motivating to play such an important role from the start. Nobody cared about my level of experience, it was all about the eagerness to learn, improve and (re-)design Picnic’s operational processes.

At the end of my internship, I was asked to stay as an Operations Supervisor at the Fulfilment Center in Nijkerk, where I was responsible for the daily operation of grocery picking. For more than a year, I combined this role with a graduation project which was directly linked to my daily work. That’s already some time ago. At the start of 2018, I (re)joined Picnic as an Operations Manager.

Currently, I’m the lead of the first Distribution Center of Picnic. And again, I’m facing the challenges of rapid growth and the use of non-mature systems to guide our operation. However, although the pace of growth and developments sometimes scared me 3 years ago, I’m now perfectly comfortable working in an environment that changes every day. Together with analysts, product owners, and developers, I work to design the processes and systems we need to grow and improve our quality of service. I started as an intern. Now, I’m an expert.

– Tim van den Berg, Distribution Center Lead