Business Development Lead

About Voyage Foods

Voyage Foods is decoupling the world's favorite foods from their traditional source material. Our portfolio spans cocoa-free chocolate, bean-free coffee, and allergen-free nut spreads, delivering the taste and functionality of the originals while insulating customers from commodity price volatility and dramatically reducing environmental footprint. We manufacture at scale in our 300,000 sq ft Ohio facility and export globally today. We sell B2B to some of the largest food companies in the world.

About the Role

We are hiring a Business Development Lead to own new customer acquisition across our product portfolio in the mid-market. This is a hunting role focused on building pipeline, running accounts end-to-end, and converting prospects into producing accounts targeting CPG manufacturers, contract manufacturers, and regional brands. This is a zero-to-one commercial environment where you will help build the playbook, CRM, and territory from the ground up.

Responsibilities

• Pipeline generation: Build and own a qualified pipeline of prospects across CPG, specifically snacking, beverage, and private label. Run structured outbound prospecting including account mapping, decision-maker identification, cold outreach, and trade show/event coverage.
• Selling a new category: Lead prospects through category-creation selling by educating R&D, procurement, and brand teams on the value proposition of our products, their performance, and portfolio fit. Manage sampling, spec alignment, and bench-to-pilot progression with customer R&D teams.
• Deal execution: Own the full deal cycle from first meeting through fulfillment. Coordinate with distribution partners on fulfillment, logistics, and account handoff mechanics.
• Commercial infrastructure: Maintain rigorous pipeline hygiene including stages, touchpoints, forecasting, and win/loss learnings. Feed market intelligence back to R&D and leadership regarding competitive moves, pricing signals, and application gaps.

Requirements

• 5 to 8 years of B2B sales or business development experience in food ingredient sales.
• Background selling novel or innovative ingredients (e.g., stevia, sugar reduction, or other new-to-market ingredients) or compound chocolate and coatings.
• Experience in food required; confectionery or bakery strongly preferred.
• Proven track record sourcing and closing new business, not just managing inherited accounts.
• Comfortable selling a technical product to R&D, procurement, and commercial stakeholders simultaneously.
• Fluent in ingredient sales mechanics: specs, sampling, trials, co-manufacturing, MOQs, indexed pricing.
• Self-directed and resourceful; able to build your own target lists, materials, and processes when they do not exist.

Why This Role

Commodity prices across cocoa and coffee have hit historic highs, and the world's biggest food companies are actively looking for structural alternatives. You will be selling products with a genuine tailwind, a real cost and sustainability story, and manufacturing capacity ready to scale behind them.