Business Development Manager, Functional Ingredients

About the role

This is a standalone commercial role, not a technical support function. You will own a named account list and carry the number on it, reporting to the Head of Commercial Development. Our R&D team runs the bench; you decide what gets run, why it gets run, and what the results mean for the customer and the business.

Responsibilities

• Own a named account list: prospect, qualify, close, and reorder.
• Carry a quota and report against it weekly.
• Negotiate pricing, volume commitments, and development agreements.
• Translate value: map customer formulation, process constraints, and current ingredient cost stack.
• Specify and direct application trials; set hypotheses, interpret results, and decide next iterations with internal and customer R&D.
• Quantify customer benefit: cost‑in‑use, functional replacement ratio, label and claim impact, process and yield benefit.
• Hold your own in a customer pilot plant – know when the answer you are given is wrong.
• Drive BD innovation: identify and remove conventions that slow ingredient qualification.
• Drive product innovation: feed customer requirements back into product development and specification.

Requirements

• Sold functional ingredients into confectionery, bakery, or condiments and personally closed the deals you claim.
• 5+ years of experience with functional ingredients (proteins, hydrocolloids, emulsifiers, enzymes, or starches).
• Command of gelation, aeration, emulsification, water binding, and heat stability in real systems.
• Carried a quota in an early‑stage ingredient business and grown a book from early revenue toward scale (zero‑to‑$50M trajectory).
• Operated without infrastructure – no marketing team, no sales ops, no brand doing the work for you.
• Technical degree in food science, chemical engineering, or equivalent, or equivalent fluency built in a lab or plant.

Skills

• Hands‑on product development experience: bench, pilot, sensory, shelf life, scale‑up, spec, QA, regulatory.
• Ability to replace an incumbent functional ingredient in a live commercial application and hold the spec through scale‑up (egg, dairy protein, hydrocolloid, or emulsifier).
• Experience taking a novel ingredient through full customer qualification, including regulatory and supply‑continuity objections.
• Founder or early commercial hire at a startup selling a physical product to industrial buyers.
• Standing relationships with R&D or procurement at major confectionery, bakery, condiment, or CPG accounts.

Benefits

• Competitive health and wellness benefits
• Medical, Dental and Vision Insurance
• Discretionary Unlimited PTO Program
• Paid Holidays
• 401k Program
• Career Stipend
• Career development and growth opportunities
• Working in a rapidly growing, flexible and entrepreneurial environment
• Team building and company‑wide events
• Financial support with relocation, if necessary, ensuring a smooth transition
• Lots of beautiful land for outdoor activities