VILLA RICA, GA — The career path for Brittny Stephenson Ohr, director of product management at Villa Rica, GA-based Sugar Foods Corp., and board chairman for the American Society of Baking (ASB), has been paved with grit, humility and hard work.
No matter the opportunity, Stephenson Ohr never backs down from a challenge, and that has shaped her leadership philosophy as well.
“I went from working in R&D to hearing, ‘Do you want to go run a bakery plant for a couple of months?’” Stephenson Ohr recalled her early career trajectory at Sugar Foods Corp. “I’ve always dreamed of having my own bakery, so of course, I said yes. And it was another very humbling experience. I’d been on the sidelines in R&D and had helped with operations for things like cost savings, but this was a crash course in how to get it all done.”
That experience also provided the opportunity to use her technical bread production expertise to provide training to a primarily Spanish-speaking workforce.
“They called me the ‘bread expert,’” she said. “It took me a while to get used to it, but after nine years, I’ve learned how to live into being the Sugar Foods bread expert. I’m the one they come to with questions, and I can own that.”