R&D Director, Global Dairy Ingredients

R&D Director, Global Dairy Ingredients

Land O'Lakes is seeking a R&D Director, Global Dairy Ingredients (GDI) to set technical strategy and lead product development across our dairy-based seasonings and ingredients, dairy protein platforms, and commodity dairy ingredients. As a customer-facing leader on the R&D leadership team, you will translate customer, commercial, and manufacturing needs into scalable solutions, build technical capability and talent, and position R&D to deliver on current commitments and future growth in high-value dairy ingredients.

Customer-Facing Product Development & Commercialization

• Lead end-to-end B2B product development across dairy-based seasonings and ingredients, dairy protein powders, and GDI commodity ingredients.
• Represent R&D as the senior technical partner in strategic customer engagements, co-development sessions, product demonstrations, qualification reviews, and issue resolution.
• Ensure technical solutions are scalable, manufacturable, repeatable, compliant, and aligned with customer expectations, product specifications, and business value.

Portfolio Strategy, Prioritization & Capability Roadmaps

• Own the GDI product development strategy and roadmap, translating commercial strategy, customer segmentation, and manufacturing realities into clearly prioritized technical work.
• Make resource and priority tradeoffs visible; balance urgent customer needs with foundational learning and longer-term capability building.
• Build technical roadmaps for high-value dairy proteins, commodity ingredient optimization, dairy-based seasoning systems, and emerging customer applications.

People Leadership, Talent Development & Succession

• Lead, coach, and develop managers, scientists, technologists, and technical contributors; set clear expectations for technical rigor, customer responsiveness, and execution discipline.
• Create role clarity, decision rights, development plans, and succession plans to build leadership depth and technical bench strength for the GDI platform.
• Foster a culture of ownership, collaboration, inclusion, continuous improvement, learning, and disciplined documentation.

Cross-Functional Integration & Technical Sales Support

• Partner closely with Sales, Marketing, Strategic Operations, Manufacturing, Quality, Regulatory, Procurement, Finance, and Supply Chain to enable faster decisions and better handoffs from concept to launch.
• Support technical selling by translating product functionality, application performance, processing constraints, and customer value into clear messages for technical and non-technical audiences.
• Serve as the escalation point for technical risk, prioritization, customer-impacting issues, and commercialization tradeoffs.

External Partnerships, Market Foresight & Continuous Improvement

• Maintain awareness of customer, market, competitive, regulatory, and technology trends relevant to B2B dairy ingredients and dairy proteins.
• Develop external partnerships with suppliers, universities, co-manufacturers, engineering firms, application labs, and technology providers to accelerate capability building and close technical gaps.
• Champion improved tools, templates, data practices, stage-gate discipline, and knowledge capture to increase speed, consistency, and R&D effectiveness.

• M.S. in Food Science, Dairy Science, Chemistry, Chemical Engineering, or related field required;
  Ph.D. and/or MBA preferred.
• 15+ years of progressive R&D, product development, and technical leadership experience in food, dairy, or ingredients.
• Direct experience with dairy proteins, spray drying, and membrane filtration strongly preferred.
• Proven people leadership, strong B2B customer presence, and the ability to translate complex technical concepts into business value.
• Demonstrated ability to manage complex portfolios, lead cross-functional teams, prioritize competing work, and make sound decisions under time pressure.

• Arden Hills, MN, four days per week in office when not traveling; office, lab, pilot plant, and manufacturing environments. Travel estimated at 10–35%.

The salary range for this role is $188,080 - $282,120. In most cases,…