About the position
The Senior PD and Culinary Science Manager will contribute towards the delivery of Global Mars Food & Nutrition projects by developing innovative product solutions and drive the global innovation pipeline. The projects will be highly complex, involving the interaction between raw materials, recipes and processes; the role involves leadership of the product development workstreams, typically as a Technical Project Lead within a cross functional project team. This role will require close collaboration with regional partners to enable technical solutions to be developed and delivered. This role will typically work across multiple projects simultaneously and must be able to prioritize effectively to deliver all to time and cost. Through technical and developmental support, this role will ensure projects are successfully delivered with autonomous product development leadership as the ultimate expectation. This role will also be expected to help drive our Mars Food & Nutrition culinary agenda & to link science & culinary capabilities to deliver their objectives. The role will support the sensory and consumer science agenda providing consumer and sensory leadership to the R&D project portfolio.
Responsibilities
- Understand our consumers to develop product solutions from initial concepts which deliver to defined consumer and customer benefits, and ensure these solutions deliver to a business model as part of the global Food & Nutrition strategy.
- Translate product development briefs into final product propositions aligning with internal stakeholders.
- Understand how to leverage technology platforms across multiple product propositions.
- Ensure we approach product development from both a scientific & culinary perspective.
- Work seamlessly with Global and Regional Marketing, Packaging Innovation, Process Development, Science & Technology, Commercial, CMI, and Supply to establish product performance targets and a route to implementation.
- Continuously drive improvements, particularly with regards efficiency and agility.
- Influence the S&T Strategy & workstreams in the context of the global innovation pipeline.
- Lead product development workstream project delivery to time, cost and quality whilst working with and influencing key stakeholders.
- Understand the balance of proposition desirability, viability and feasibility.
- Develop and deliver an aligned final Product Specification.
- Ensure effective risk management of the product development workstreams, linking cross functionally.
- Drive the product development workstreams to pre-stage gate technical readiness and follow through on post launch review and optimization.
- Define the key quality attributes through iterative prototyping, sensory evaluation and consumer research (in collaboration with sensory and consumer scientists).
- Provide high quality formal and informal communication on the progress of the product development workstreams.
- Proactively managing Intellectual Property risks and opportunities and leveraging Intellectual Property to insulate our innovations.
- Support business and team objectives including engagement, impact planning and HPC.
- Link the science & the culinary to consumer understanding to develop new concepts & propositions.
- Translate Product Development Briefs into prototypes to learn from and further develop, ensuring we have relevant benchmarks.
- Drive external culinary trend understanding to build into future concepts and innovations, aligned with our business strategy.
- Conduct and analyze sensory and flavor related research on the consumer-product interface.
- Provide consumer research methodology leadership to Product Design and Development teams.
Requirements
- Bachelor's Degree in Food Science, Food Engineering, Food Chemistry or Biochemistry.
- Minimum of 8 years' experience in a FMCG environment.
- Strong experience in product development, culinary, consumer & sensory science.
- Professional knowledge of raw material, recipe/ formulation and manufacturing processes in a relevant field.
- Demonstrated Project management success.
- Proficiency in MS Office applications and project management tools.
- Excellent interpersonal skills and fluent in English (communication, relationship building, networking, team work).
Benefits
- Best-in-class learning and development support from day one, including access to our in-house Mars University.
- An industry competitive salary and benefits package, including company bonus.
