Business Development Manager, Functional Ingredients

About the role

We are a biology company Plantible, backed by Astanor Ventures, Lerer Hippeau, Piva Capital, Kellogg’s, and Vectr Ventures, is a vertically integrated biology company that is unlocking the power in plants in service of people & planet. Our mission is to create solutions that empower customers to make sustainable and regenerative choices without compromising on quality. We are beginning with the food industry.

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 hypothesis, read results, decide next iteration.
• 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 conventions that slow ingredient qualification and remove them.
• 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 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 shape).
• 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.

Preferred Qualifications

• Hands‑on product development experience: bench, pilot, sensory, shelf life, scale‑up, spec, QA, regulatory.
• Know where a formulation breaks and why.
• Replaced an incumbent functional ingredient in a live commercial application and held the spec through scale‑up (egg, dairy protein, hydrocolloid, or emulsifier).
• Took 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, entrepreneurial environment.
• Team building and company‑wide events.
• Financial support with relocation, if necessary.
• Access to beautiful land for outdoor activities.

Pay

The pay range for this role is $130,000 – $140,000 USD per year.