Lead, R&D - Design & Innovation, Packaging

Position: Lead, R&D - Design & Innovation, Central Packaging
Job Description

Job Purpose

As the Design & Innovation Leader, you will lead a team of packaging innovation experts responsible for identifying, driving and leading innovative and disruptive packaging design initiatives that will be instrumental in delivering novel, competitively advantaged solutions across the Kraft Heinz North America portfolio. The team's objective is to deliver packaging design strategies, translating brand strategies and consumer Jobs-To-Be-Done (JTBD) into viable design solutions to meet growth, innovation and sustainability objectives.

In this role, you will be responsible for establishing capabilities to develop, prototype, consumer test and pilot novel pkg design solutions. This individual will lead the team to build platformable pkg innovation solutions, identifying modular, platformable designs across brands and categories to fuel sustainable BU innovation pipelines. You will partner with the Innovation, Process and Platform packaging teams as well as cross functional stakeholders to translate consumer insights and sustainability requirements into commercially viable, manufacturable solutions.

The role includes identifying packaging design solutions, leveraging external design partners and internal consumer experience teams to translate insights into viable designs that resonate with consumers. The ideal candidate combines deep technical packaging commercialization expertise with strong design and innovation knowledge and proven experience managing complex design projects and technical teams

Essential Functions & Responsibilities

• Lead and prioritize a portfolio of packaging design strategies and initiatives to deliver against short and long term business objectives in the retail and food service businesses. Gain alignment across key functions and prioritize initiatives and resources appropriately by balancing external partnerships with design thinking, leveraging DVF (Desirability, Viability, Feasibility)

• Build, coordinate and manage complex partnerships across the value chain to demonstrate value and business case, address technical and design hurdles, drive speed to market and enable competitive advantage.

• Represent Kraft Heinz externally on critical industry committees and forums, serving as one external voice to advance packaging design and innovation, making Kraft Heinz become recognized for packaging design and innovation leadership in the industry

• Develop strategic packaging design requirements (playbook) across NA categories

• Work directly, interface and influence cross-functional team (Marketing, Procurement, Operations and Supply Chain) and vendors.

• Work across enterprise (mentor and/or teacher) to expand capabilities of developers in area(s) of expertise - Design and Innovation

• Lead efforts to prioritize external design agencies, managing relationships with suppliers, design and innovation partners, to drive pkg disruptive, innovation solutions

• Lead/direct team to lead pkg design/technology award submissions with external sponsors, working with R&D platform teams and suppliers to build submissions for leadership/comms/marketing alignment

• Manage multiple/large initiatives with complex scopes and/or cross enterprise platforms concurrently

• Partner with legal to build robust IP strategies, conduct exploration and help build IP portfolio to drive competitive advantage

• Own project and portfolio-level budgets, resourcing strategies and capacity planning to ensure delivery within approved financial guardrails. Develop and maintain detailed project plans, schedules, budgets and resource allocations to monitor progress, assess risk, escalate tradeoffs, and drive corrective actions.

• Serve as an accountable owner for governance, escalation and go/no-go decisions. Represent packaging in steering forums and influence stakeholders. Provide technical leadership and oversight on packaging reviews to ensure design decisions align with enterprise standards, manufacturability, sustainability, and long-term platform strategy

• Serve as Subject Matter Expert by leading and driving functional training and process improvements for the pkg organization.

• Mentor, coach and train junior team members

People Management Responsibilities

• Team (salaried): targeting 3 direct reports

Key Outputs & Deliverables

• Deliver design training and process improvements for the pkg organization

• Deliver design strategy and pipeline for North America portfolio, leading and directing team to deliver against design initiatives to address innovation, sustainability and value engineering.

• Lead and direct a team of packaging innovation experts to successfully deliver 5 to 10 concurrent complex packaging design projects annually across flexible, rigid and thermoform materials and formats, meeting committed timelines, budgets, and technical performance targets from concept through proof of concept and handover.

• Ensure compliance with evolving sustainability and regulatory requirements for portfolio projects, including:

• Minimizing Extended Producer…