Senior Product Technologist (Category Product Technologist)

• Support the establishment of consumer and category benchmarking with a particular focus on existing competitors, market solutions and sensory product profiling
• Support the development of the innovation pipeline within your assigned categories by participating in exploratory activities to surface new product ideas with moderate input from the supervisor
• Analyze consumer/regional analysis and extrapolate into a targeted product brief
• Develop new products within the assigned categories, executing and analyzing an experimental approach for product design, effectively troubleshooting as necessary and offering plausible, executable solutions
• Develop information for product/ingredient specifications, in-process control points and testing requirements
• Develop robust product specifications (from a nutritional and ingredient standpoint) to ensure sustainable and flexible formulas that will meet consumer, quality and process needs.

• Management of several medium-complexity projects with little supervision within the assigned categories
• Provide technical input through the planning and decision-making process and effectively communicate with senior R&D management
• Plan and lead product development projects and collaborate effectively with a cross-functional, multidisciplinary team to achieve the project scope on time and within budget while meeting quality parameters
• Deliver a flawless handover to Operations, document findings and all relevant reports according to standard and capture lessons learned and best practices.

• Responsible for adhering to the company stability program by ensuring timely initiation of stability studies, execution and reporting as directed by the category responsible as part of recipe development & improvement or packaging changes
• Perform trials/experiments in kitchen/lab/pilot and factory scale to achieve all briefed objectives on time
• Support the category during product industrialization by acquiring basic process understanding and ensuring proper knowledge transfer from R&D to operations.

• Responsible for approving Quality Control Samples
• Effectively ensuring constant upkeep of competition analysis with basic sensorial and consumer understanding to support product development.
• Support the various matching programs
• Participate effectively in investigations and problem-solving initiatives
• Perform product analysis and set up new methods when required.

• Master’s degree in food technology/ Food Engineering with more 5 years of experience in product development
• A PhD in a relevant area will be preferred
• 5 years of experience in Food Product Development in the factory/kitchen/lab environment.

• Knowledge of food technology
• Strong knowledge and competencies in flavour chemistry (e.g. flavour generation, flavour stability, sensory relevance), and link to raw materials and food processing
• Good level of ingredient knowledge & their impact on the process and final product
• Good knowledge of processes and technologies involved in food manufacturing
• Ability to analyse and understand consumer/regional analysis
• Good Sensorial skills and ability to draw conclusions
• Industry safety standards and Good Manufacturing Practices (GMPs).

• Creativity and Innovation
• Analytical thinking and problem-solving
• Attention to detail
• Drive for results
• Quality Orientation
• Teamwork
• Verbal and written communication
• Environmental scanning
• Program and Project Management
• Planning and organizing
• Monitoring and measuring

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