Director, R&D - Formulation

Leads formulation-driven R&D activities across priority business platforms, ensuring development of commercially viable products that meet customer, regulatory, operational, sensory, nutritional, and financial expectations. Responsible for translating customer briefs and business priorities into optimized, scalable formulations while driving innovation, cost competitiveness, IP development and protection, and monetization of the opportunity pipeline. This role leads the formulation organization with a clear focus on speed-to-market, first-round sample acceptance (making it to the second round and/or hitting customer expectations), commercialization success, and organic growth through new product development, applications development, benchtop sessions, standard samples, and formulation cost-out.

While formulation is the primary focus, this role and the team also provide process design, process validation, scale-up support, plant trial leadership, and troubleshooting expertise when required to ensure products can be successfully manufactured at commercial scale.

Job Duties and Responsibilities:

Formulation Development & Execution:

• Lead formulation development from concept through pilot plant readiness across dairy beverages, cultured systems, sauces, cheese, dry blends, concentrates, flavors, specialty co-drying, and other priority platforms
• Translate customer briefs, business objectives, and consumer needs into executable formulation plans with clear success criteria, timelines, risks, and decision points
• Own ingredient selection, supplier qualification input, benchtop development, iterative prototyping, formula optimization, nutritional targets, and application validation
• Use sensory science, analytical data (from R&D work and plants), and customer end‑use testing to ensure products meet or exceed expectations for taste, functionality, nutrition, processing performance, and shelf‑life
• Drive disciplined documentation in R&D modeling solutions, including formula version control, development notes, learnings, specifications, sample history, and commercialization readiness inputs
• Define and validate critical product and process requirements, including processing conditions, ingredient addition sequence, hydration, shear, heat treatment, hold times, cooling, packaging considerations, and other parameters needed to translate bench formulations into repeatable manufacturing processes.

Commercialization Readiness & Pipeline Monetization:

• Monetize the opportunity and innovation pipeline by prioritizing formulation work that supports growth, margin, strategic customer needs, and ROI expectations
• Drive formulation support for priority commercialization programs, ensuring samples are internally validated before customer submission and ready for scale‑up handoff
• Partner with Processing Design & Validation, Operations, Quality, Regulatory, Procurement, Supply Chain, Finance, and Commercialization to reduce risk from bench to pilot plant to full‑scale production
• Lead or support process design and validation work when formulation decisions directly affect equipment capability, processing windows, yield, product stability, food safety, quality attributes, throughput, or commercial feasibility
• Improve speed-to-market, sample turnaround time, first-round acceptance (making it to the second round and/or hitting customer expectations), scale‑up success, and customer conversion through disciplined development plans and decision‑making
• Partner with plants and technical resources to design trials, establish run conditions, evaluate process performance, document learnings, and confirm that the final formula‑process combination is ready for repeatable commercialization
• Use CRM/Salesforce and R&D metrics to manage…