Lead Development Chef; Flax Bourton

• Flax Bourton, Bristol, North Somerset, BS48 1UL
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FSC is a family business with more than 35 years of award-winning experience in creating, rolling out and managing bespoke customer food-on-the-move solutions. Our customers include a selection of blue-chip companies in various industries, such as Shell, National Trust, Waterstones and Dunelm.

We offer a range of consultancy services drawing on our in-depth knowledge of the food-on-the-move sector and have managed projects all over the world.

Our Head Office is located in the world-famous village of Cheddar, our Innovation Centre is based near Bristol in Flax Bourton. Internationally, we also have offices in Prague (Czech Republic) and Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia)

Although our colleagues are based all over the world, we regularly get together to review performance, share best practice and socialise! As well as working in a challenging and fast-moving environment, we believe it is important to have a big chunk of fun and no day is ever the same at FSC.

At FSC we believe in ethical stewardship of all aspects within our business. This means that we thrive in a diverse, equitable culture where we celebrate inclusion and empowerment within our teams, and seek to always support our global community, minimising our carbon footprint wherever possible.

To help grow this awareness we have adopted a company wide ESG focus.

To lead the development of exciting, commercially viable food-on-the-move ranges across FSC’s customer base, from first idea through to launch. The Lead Development Chef owns the creative and technical direction of NPD. They hold the day-to-day development relationship with key customers, turn a brief into a range that hits the target cost and the operational reality of the outlet, and sign it off as ready for manufacture.

They also lead and develop the development chef team (two Development Chefs), setting the standards the NPD kitchen works to.

Concept & Product Development:
Own and support the concept-to-launch process across multiple customer accounts, running several projects in parallel. Turn customer briefs into coherent ranges with a clear point of difference, set creative direction balancing trend, customer expectation and commercial reality, lead ideation sessions, keep up to date with UK and international food trends and competitor ranges, and approve final recipes and specifications that are accurate, achievable and manufacturable at scale.
Customer & Account Ownership:
Present ranges and concepts confidently to customers at all levels, manage expectations on timing, cost and feasibility, push back constructively where a brief is not deliverable, and support international customers by adapting ranges to local supply chain and consumer expectations.
Commercial:
Take responsibility for hitting agreed cost and margin targets, reformulate products to close cost gaps without losing quality, manage key cost drivers across ingredients, labour, packaging and yield, and control kitchen and sample spend.
Leading the Team:
Lead, manage and develop the development chef team, allocate projects and workload, coach and train, carry out one-to-ones, appraisals and objective setting, support recruitment and induction, and set…