Customer Success Manager

Location: Irvine, CA (Remote)

About the role

As the Manager of Customer Success, you will play a strategic role in helping customers discover what's next in food and supporting them along their Food Innovation journey. Our Customer Success managers work at the intersection of consumer trends, culinary innovation, product development, and commercialization. You'll help our customers bring new ideas to life—from identifying growth opportunities to supporting the development of innovative menu solutions. You'll collaborate with chefs, marketers, researchers, product development, supply chain, and sales teams to turn insights into action and create meaningful business impact for our customers.

Responsibilities

• Innovation Service Delivery: Deliver Ventura Foods' innovation services with consistency, excellence, and impact. Partner with Culinary, Product Development, Marketing, and Sales teams to identify emerging food trends, develop innovation concepts, and deliver customer-ready solutions to drive growth. Create experiences, support brainstorms and ideations, and bring the message of food innovation and manufacturing expertise to life in innovative, memorable ways.
• Customer Account Management: Act as the primary innovation contact for assigned customer accounts. Build and maintain strong customer partnerships, increase strategic relationships with key customers through proactive and regular innovation content. Blend analytical skills and confidence working with consumer and industry data sources with a natural curiosity within the food and innovation space. Uncover relevant consumer data that supports customer needs, discover new opportunities, and present those opportunities in compelling ways.
• Project Management: Develop a strong understanding of product design, commercialization, and the end-to-end innovation process to effectively guide customer opportunities from idea to reality. Work closely with Product Development, Culinary, Marketing, and Sales teams to understand what it takes to successfully develop, launch, and scale innovative solutions. Serve as an advocate for customer innovation projects, ensure concepts presented externally are grounded in operational feasibility and positioned for successful execution. Drive alignment, track project progress, and help transform insights into ideas and real-world outcomes.
• Communication Skills: Deliver food innovation, consumer, and menu trends content aligned with an annual calendar, providing value-added and impactful insights to a broad customer base. Synthesize insights from multiple sources into clear, compelling, and actionable recommendations that resonate with customers and inspire action. Demonstrate exceptional written, verbal, and presentation skills with the ability to craft impactful narratives.
• Cultural Fit: Contribute to promoting a culture of creativity and continuous improvement. Build trusted relationships with customers. Collaborate across functions (Culinary, Product Development, Category Marketing, Research, Digital Marketing, Commercialization, and Sales) to deliver against customer needs. Work in a team environment, proactively bringing stakeholders and cross-functional partners along.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Business, Marketing, Communications, or a related field (required).
• 3+ years of experience in innovation, marketing, customer marketing, category management, or sales with innovation project experience (required).
• Experience with customer-facing activity and engagement (required).
• Ability to travel up to 25%.
• MBA is a plus.
• Experience working with national chain accounts, regional chain accounts, distributors, or food service operators is a bonus.
• Background in channel or insights-driven marketing is a plus.
• PMP certification is a plus.

Skills

• Strong interpersonal, verbal, written, and presentation communication skills, along with relationship-building abilities.
• Strong planning, organization, project management, and time management skills.
• Passion for food, demonstrated interest in foodservice, restaurant, and/or retail product innovation.
• Proficient with Microsoft Office applications.
• Comfortable working in fast-paced, highly matrixed organizations.
• Strong problem-solving and analytical skills.
• Ability to work collaboratively in a remote environment.

About Ventura Foods

Ventura Foods innovates and manufactures food solutions for foodservice and retail businesses. We make exclusive products for the world's most iconic restaurants and retailers, provide ready-to-go product solutions for professional kitchens, and create consumer brands everyone knows and loves. Our culture reflects our commitment to treating every employee with respect and creating an environment where people can do their best work. We rely on a variety of strengths, backgrounds, and experiences across our teams to help us innovate, grow, and deliver for our customers.

Benefits

• Medical, Prescription, Dental, & Vision coverage beginning on your 1st day for eligible employees.
• Profit Sharing and 401(k) matching (after eligible criteria is met).
• Paid Vacation, Sick Time, and Holidays.
• Employee Appreciation Events and Employee Assistance Programs.

Pay

Base salary range: $109,060.95 – $171,773.09. Annual bonus based on the incentive program terms and conditions.