R&D Technical Commercialization Director

R&D Technical Commercialization Director

Job Category
:
Research & Development

Requisition Number
: RDTEC
001690

• Posted :
  September 1, 2026
• Full-Time
• On-site

Showing 1 location

Houston, TX 77064, USA

• Travel Required :
  Yes

Sunny Sky Products is a leading B2B beverage solutions provider serving convenience, food service, enterprise, specialty, and healthcare markets. With a diverse portfolio across Hot, Cold, Frozen, and Beverage Enhancer categories, we serve customers through owned and licensed brands including Dr. Smoothie, Upouria, El Nino, Hershey, Sour Patch Kids, and Jolly Rancher.

Our manufacturing spans multiple processes and facilities — hot-fill (Fullerton, CA), pasteurized and frozen juice (Frostproof, FL and Chicago, IL), low-acid aseptic (Douglasville, PA), and dry blend (Tinley Park, IL and Houston, TX). This breadth of process technology is central to the technical demands of this role.

The Director of R&D Technical Commercialization is the critical bridge between Sunny Sky's innovation pipeline and its commercial execution engine. This role exists to close the gap between bench science and market-ready products — ensuring that what R&D develops reaches customers on time, on spec, and producible at scale in the plant that will actually run it.

The role requires someone equally fluent in food science and in commercial conversations — comfortable reviewing a formulation spec and validating its thermal process in the morning, and presenting a launch-readiness assessment to the commercial leadership team in the afternoon. Critically, this person is expected to know how our formulas are actually produced — the real time, temperature, and equipment conditions at each plant — and to design and validate against those conditions.

• Process-matched formulation. Ensure every formulation is designed and validated against the actual production process and conditions it will run on — hot-fill, pasteurization, low-acid aseptic, or dry blend — including verified time and temperature parameters at the specific plant.
• Ingredient stability. Verify that raw materials and flavor systems are specified to withstand their intended process (e.g., heat-stable vs. solvent/alcohol-based flavor systems under sustained hot-fill exposure). Disqualify ingredients that degrade under the real thermal load.
• Analytical discipline. Establish and enforce use of titratable acidity (TA), pH, and Brix as standard, measured design targets for all new product development and competitive benchmarking/matching.
• Specification integrity. Drive a program to tighten legacy and new quality specs so that product made at the high and low ends of a pH/Brix (and TA) range is sensorially consistent — eliminating specs so wide they yield two different-tasting products.
• Process authority & food safety. Partner with QA and operations on scheduled processes, acidified-food and low-acid aseptic requirements, and shelf-life validation; ensure formulations are documented against approved process parameters.
• Own the handoff from R&D lab to commercial launch — formulation finalization through scale-up, shelf-life validation, regulatory sign-off, and first production run.
• Serve as the primary point of contact between R&D and Sales, Marketing, Operations, and Supply Chain on all active commercialization projects.
• Maintain and enforce a stage-gate commercialization process: track project status, flag risks early, and proactively elevate bottlenecks and emerging product issues to the VP R&D and CCO — such issues should surface from R&D, not reach leadership by other routes.
• Translate technical R&D outputs (specs, test results, process parameters) into commercial-ready language…