Senior Manager, Research and Development (Baking / Food Manufacturing)

Key Responsibilities

• Lead technical activities to advance multiple projects concurrently through the Stage Gate commercialization process while considering the level of risk, operational constraints, and overall cost.
• Lead continuous improvement initiatives for the commercialization process to enhance our win rate, reduce our costs, improve our new product scale up, and expedite our speed to market.
• Communicate progress of all products under commercialization. Leverages methods and procedures for monitoring project success, such as metrics, resource investment, research findings, progress reports, and staff meetings.
• Work collaboratively and develop strong relationships with cross functional teams including QA, Plant Operations, Engineering, and Procurement to solve key business issues and drive profitable growth.
• Establish goals, appraise performance, recommend training, and provide input into final review for all direct reports. Coach reports on job performance and build a high functioning team.
• Identify and implement innovative, practical application and modification of ingredients, formulations, and process.
• Provide and communicate technical and business risk assessment to upper management.
• Provide technical support with customer on product information and process capability.
• Support the process design and review on new capability expansion, cost enhancement, and/or process improvement opportunities.
• Direct and prioritize work for the R&D department, ensuring R&D processes/data are complete, accurate, and consistent.

Qualifications

• Degree in Food Science / Food Engineering with a strong functional Baking Science background (minimum 10 years bakery/food development / manufacturing experience) with 5 years management experience
• Experience with leading new products through commercialization within a manufacturing environment.
• Recipe / Formulation and raw material knowledge / experience.
• Excellent written and oral communication skills
• Working knowledge of MS Office (Outlook, Word, Excel), SharePoint, ERP systems
• Working knowledge of US food standards and regulations.
• Strong bench work skills with the ability to execute solutions rapidly
• Experience in baking, pastry arts, R+D and Food / Baking Science
• Ability/willingness to work off hours or extended amounts of time during product scale ups.
• Ability/willingness to travel up to 25% of the time.