Research Chef, Culinary Innovations

Job Details:

Job Location:

DC6 DLine - Graham, NC 27253, Position Type:
Full Time, Salary Range: $78,000.00 - $95,000.00 Salary/year, Travel Percentage:
Moderate | 25-50%, Position Summary

The Research Chef, Culinary Innovation is a key culinary innovation leader within AFI Labs. This role translates customer needs, consumer insights, culinary intelligence, and technical possibilities into commercially relevant food and beverage solutions.

The Research Chef combines culinary creativity with product development, sensory expertise, project leadership, and customer consultation. This person leads assigned innovation projects, establishes culinary gold standards, collaborates with Food Scientists through development and commercialization, and serves as a trusted food and beverage subject matter expert.

The right candidate is equally comfortable creating in the kitchen, collaborating in the laboratory, leading an ideation session, presenting to customers, evaluating products, exploring markets, and working through the realities of commercial manufacturing.

• Lead culinary development for customer and internal innovation projects from concept through validated gold standard.
• Create food and beverage concepts grounded in customer objectives, consumer needs, market opportunities, and operational realities.
• Establish culinary gold standards including recipes, preparation methods, sensory attributes, ingredient expectations, and finished product targets.
• Translate culinary intent into actionable development direction for Food Scientists and technical teams.
• Collaborate with R&D through formulation, prototype development, sensory evaluation, scale-up, and commercialization.
• Apply practical knowledge of ingredient functionality, food science, processing, food safety, and Good Manufacturing Practices.
• Identify culinary, technical, operational, ingredient, and equipment challenges and help develop practical solutions.

• Independently manage multiple innovation projects, priorities, timelines, and deliverables with strong ownership and follow through.
• Maintain accurate recipes, development records, sensory observations, decisions, and project documentation.
• Communicate progress, risks, resource needs, and decisions clearly across project teams.
• Serve as a culinary consultant and innovation partner for customer projects.
• Understand customer brands, consumers, products, operations, and business objectives, then translate those needs into actionable culinary solutions.
• Lead and support customer presentations, tastings, demonstrations, product reviews, and innovation sessions.
• Represent AFI Labs with confidence, preparation, professionalism, and strong customer presence.

• Design and facilitate structured ideation and brainstorming sessions for customers and internal teams.
• Convert broad opportunities into focused concepts with clear consumer, culinary, operational, and commercial relevance.
• Maintain current knowledge of local, domestic, and global food and beverage developments.
• Track emerging flavors, ingredients, cuisines, formats, technologies, equipment, consumer behaviors, and cultural influences.
• Maintain strong awareness of food service, QSR, fast casual, retail, convenience store, and relevant adjacent channels.
• Conduct market visits, competitive reviews, menu research, and food and beverage immersions.
• Translate consumer, competitive, and market intelligence into practical innovation opportunities.

• Apply advanced sensory acuity across flavor, aroma, texture, appearance, and the overall eating and drinking experience.
• Evaluate prototypes, ingredients, competitive products, and finished applications with consistency and discipline.
• Establish clear sensory targets and benchmarks for development projects.
• Communicate sensory observations using precise, actionable language while separating personal preference from customer, consumer, brand, and application requirements.

• Strengthen AFI Labs through culinary education, training, knowledge development, and experiential learning.
• Develop and lead food and beverage training programs for customers and internal teams.
• Create category, cuisine, ingredient, technology, and market immersions that build knowledge and inspire innovation.
• Develop reusable culinary resources, reference standards, applications, and training materials.
• Support customer experiences,…