Summary
The Director of Product Development – Customer Driven Growth will be
responsible for leading a team of food scientists who are
focused on the execution of Customer Driven projects with the intent to rapidly
execute product development and get great samples to customers in short amounts
of time. They must be comfortable
working in an extremely fast environment and leading a team with multiple
competing priorities that change rapidly. These projects could be new flavor developments, small changes to
existing products, or mimicking competitive products to
meet a customer need. These projects
come from our customers and we will win in this space by being faster and more
agile than our competition.
Duties and Responsibilities
· Ability to work directly with sales on inbound
projects to build and understand priorities.
· Ability to work in an environment with a large
number of projects and changing priorities.
· Ability to accurately communicate status on a
large number of projects that the team is working on.
· Ability to drive accountability through the
organization.
· Develop and teach all SOPs in the area
(including reverse engineering and matching of existing competitive products).
· Leading, developing, and coaching a team of Food
Scientists
· Encourage the “food first” culture.
· Conduct and document sensory evaluation of
products.
· Record keeping of formulas, ingredients, and
finished products
· Coach and mentor junior developers and culinary
team members
- BS, MS or PhD
- Experience 8+ years in product development
(preferably the food industry)
- High learning agility and curiosity
- Proven track record of successful leadership of
an R&D department
- Proven track record of working in a high speed,
agile work environment.
- Comfortable being a working leader.
- Solid organizational skills and proven ability
to manage multiple projects and assignments
- Ability to taste foods and identify and describe
attributes and defects in appearance, texture, flavor, and aroma
- Experience in formulating refrigerated products
is a plus
- Willing to learn and share learning
- Ability to work in a team environment
- Excellent verbal and written communication
- Respect confidentiality of privileged
information
- Computer skills (Microsoft Office, Genesis and
Navision are helpful)
Competencies/ Skills
- Presentations Skills
- Teamwork
- Organizational Skills
- Communications Proficiency (to include written
and verbal)
- Time Management (manage priorities among
multiple projects)
- Well developed external network that can be
leveraged to help solve problems