Senior Manager, Culinary Innovation & Commercialization

Senior Manager, Culinary Innovation & Commercialization

This range is provided by CAVA. Your actual pay will be based on your skills and experience — talk with your recruiter to learn more.

$/yr - $/yr

At CAVA we make it deliciously simple to eat well and feel good every day. We are guided by a Mediterranean heritage that’s been perfecting how to eat and live for four thousand years. We prioritize authenticity, curiosity and the pursuit of excellence in everything we do. We are working towards something big, together.

We foster a culture built on five core values:

• Generosity First, Always: We lead with kindness. Our best work happens when we act in service of others.
• Constant Curiosity: We are eager to learn, grow, and explore beyond the obvious.
• Act with Agility: We welcome change; it’s the only constant. We embrace, adjust, adapt.
• Passion for Positivity: We greet each day with warmth and possibility.
• Collective Ambition: We have high aspirations that are achieved when we work together with a shared purpose.

Commercial Development Functions

• Support consumer and supplier testing, internal cuttings as well as operation and market testing.
• Track and measure testing effectiveness, focusing on team member impact and ease of recipe execution.
• Partner with operations to support training content and delivery for new seasonal rollouts.
• Drive commercial development and refinement after concepting/ bench innovation through scale up and launch including, but not limited to, product matching, ingredient testing, hold, yield, and portioning analysis.
• Navigate creative culinary innovation with technical R&D, food science to support cross‑functional collaboration across Operations, Finance, FSQA and Supply Chain.
• Support product scale‑up in test kitchens, commissaries, or co‑manufacturing environments, including coordination of plant trials and evaluations and post‑production adherence audits.
• Manage creation and maintenance of project development, including standardized recipes, ingredient specifications, nutritional data, allergen declarations, and process SOPs.
• Drive new and existing supplier discovery to include collaborative R&D efforts, process improvement and the generation of CAVA product specifications.
• Identify and establish the critical culinary components within the menu that help to maintain the highest food quality standards for CAVA on a continuous basis.

Financial Analysis Functions

• Conduct initial COGs and labor analysis to support target performance KPIs to inform project priorities and key areas for improvement and value add engineering.
• Navigate ambiguity and measure what matters—determine measurable and actionable objectives throughout testing and development process and distill findings and drive solutions.
• Partner with FP&A on cost parameters to ensure product profitability and performance expectations.
• Reformulate recipes whenever necessary to allow for greater cost controls, without compromising established food quality standards.

• Strong leadership and team management skills, with the ability to inspire and motivate others.
• Experience with product scale‑ups and commercialization.
• 5+ years working in a similar role with multi‑unit restaurant organizations or experience with operations management, supply chain logistics, or manufacturing preferred.
• Ability to prioritize and manage multiple projects and initiatives simultaneously.
• Proficiency in Microsoft Office Suite, Outlook, SharePoint, and Adobe Creative Suite.
• Strong leadership skills with a proven ability to develop and implement training programs.
• Track record of demonstrable skillset in development strategy with operational focus.
• Qualitative and quantitative approach to problem solving and a drive for continuous process improvement.
• Relationship‑focused—strong team orientation and collaborative style.

• Ability to maintain stationary position to be able to operate a computer and other office equipment.
• Must be able to identify, analyze and assess details.
• For certain positions, must be able to occasionally move or transport items up to 50 pounds.
• Ability to communicate with others…