Product Developer

Job description

Before the word “foodie” was a thing, you were a real one—mixing and matching sugar, spice and all things tasty and nice. Before they coined the term “superfood” you were super at developing foods that tasted as good as they looked. You always consider flavor, texture, and temperature changes. Friends and family often watch you in the kitchen with their jaws dropped in pure awe (and hoping that you’ll gift them with the foods of your labor). And, amongst your many, many cool party-tricks, you can find your way around the kitchen, freezer, pantry, and fridge blindfolded. We’re looking for someone with years of experience to have a heavy hand in new product development (but never a heavy hand with durians, cumin, or—the Siete debate—cilantro). If you’re excited to help our familia grow and evolve our current product lines (a list that includes salsas, sauces, chips, tortillas, cookies, beans, taco shells, seasonings, and more!), we would love to hear from you. ### About you: - You’re detail-oriented and precise. - You’re a natural-born multi-tasker, problem solver, and self-starter. - Collaboration and communication are your bread and butter. - You like to cook on your own time, and the idea of creating new products fires you up. - Easy-Bake Oven taught you a lot, but these days you’ve graduated to playing with product development, formulas, and testing. - Scalability of a product is always top of rack—er, mind. - You embrace agility and are able to work with short lead times. - Every spoon, fork, knife, and utensil in your kitchen has a place. Organization comes as naturally to you as breathing. . - Your culinary creativity knows no bounds. ### What you will do: - Create innovative, heritage-inspired food that is dietarily inclusive. - Be the champion for flavor, texture, and clean labels in our products, helping scale without allowing our scaling processes to compromise these attributes. - Support the formulation process from start to finish including research and planning, development and refinement, launching the product. - Work cross-functionally with the Operational team and co-manufacturing partners to gather manufacturing processing and equipment information. - Test/Assist benchtop ingredient sourcing and develop basic initial raw material specifications throughout the formulation process. - Work with R&D team to scale products: set production process, maximize shelf life, and overcome any technical roadblocks for your project. - Develop bench-top samples to present to different functions of the company as well as outside of the company. - Support formula documentation and records across various systems (e.g. TraceGains, Trustwell Genesis) throughout development. - Assist the Innovation and Renovation initiatives of the company to help create new products and renovate existing ones, as needed. - Contribute culinary expertise and knowledge to guide and accelerate the development and reformulation of new and current products. - Travel approximately 25% of the time to support supplier and co-manufacturing relations, plant trials, and provide on-site support as needed. ### Your experience: - 3-5 years of experience in product development as a chef and/or food technologist - Proficiency with Excel or Google Docs is preferred - Previous experience with food labeling software such as Genesis is preferred