Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree in Food Science, Dairy Science, Chemical Engineering, or a related technical discipline (Master's degree preferred).
- 8+ years of progressive R&D experience within the consumer packaged goods (CPG) food industry.
- Strong experience developing frozen desserts, frozen novelties, dairy products, or similar frozen food categories.
- Proven success leading products from concept through commercial manufacturing.
- Demonstrated knowledge of food chemistry, microbiology, ingredient functionality, and frozen food processing.
- Strong understanding of rice and starch rheology and its impact on texture, stabilization, processing, and finished product performance.
- Experience leading cross-functional teams and collaborating with executive leadership to drive innovation and business growth.
Position Summary
Responsible for leading the company's innovation strategy, product development pipeline, and renovation efforts across its frozen novelty portfolio. This leader drives the development of new products while continuously improving existing formulations for taste, texture, nutrition, quality, manufacturability, and cost.
This role oversees the entire product development lifecycle from concept and benchtop formulation through pilot trials, plant scale-up, commercialization, and post-launch optimization while ensuring all products meet regulatory, food safety, and quality standards.
Key Responsibilities
- Lead the company's innovation pipeline by identifying consumer trends, white-space opportunities, and emerging technologies to develop differentiated frozen novelty products.
- Direct all phases of product development, including formulation, sensory evaluation, pilot testing, plant trials, commercialization, and continuous product improvement.
- Drive improvements to existing products by optimizing flavor, texture, mouthfeel, nutritional profile, shelf life, ingredient functionality, manufacturing efficiency, and overall cost of goods.
- Serve as the company's technical expert in frozen dessert formulation, including dairy and non-dairy systems, emulsions, fat crystallization, overrun management, stabilizer systems, inclusion technology, coating formulations, and texture optimization.
- Partner closely with Operations and Supply Chain to ensure products are scalable, commercially viable, and optimized for manufacturing through ingredient selection, freezing technologies, processing methods, packaging, and supplier collaboration.
- Ensure compliance with all FDA, USDA, FSMA, labeling, nutritional, food safety, and quality requirements while working closely with Quality Assurance throughout the development and commercialization process.
- Lead the company's sensory evaluation program to ensure consistent product quality and support data-driven product decisions through consumer feedback, benchmarking, and internal sensory panels.
- Build strong relationships with ingredient suppliers, co-manufacturers, packaging partners, and external technical resources to accelerate innovation and improve product performance.
- Lead, mentor, and develop the R&D team while managing departmental priorities, project timelines, budgets, and technical resources.
- Monitor key R&D performance metrics, including innovation pipeline, project execution, speed-to-market, product quality, and cost optimization, to ensure business objectives are achieved.