Food Scientist

Scientist - Bakery Applications & Product Development

Location:

North Jersey
Working Pattern:
Fully On-site
Industry: Bakery Ingredients / Food Ingredients / Ingredient Systems

An established food ingredients manufacturer is looking to add a Scientist - Bakery Applications & Product Development to its R&D team in North Jersey. This is a highly hands-on position focused on the development, formulation and application of dry-blended bakery ingredient systems for commercial customers. Approximately 75% of the role will be laboratory and applications focused, making this particularly suited to a food scientist who enjoys being hands-on with ingredients, formulations and baking trials rather than working primarily behind a desk.

The successful candidate will work across new product development, customer-specific formulations, product optimization and technology transfer, helping take concepts from the laboratory through to commercial production.

• Develop and optimize dry-blended bakery ingredient formulations for customer-specific and internally driven innovation projects.
• Conduct hands-on mixing, formulation, baking trials, sample preparation, testing and sensory evaluation.
• Understand ingredient functionality and determine how individual ingredients interact within different bakery systems.
• Perform formulation calculations, nutritional calculations and product evaluations to support new and existing products.
• Support reverse engineering and reformulation projects, evaluating existing products and developing alternative or improved ingredient systems.
• Evaluate the impact of enzymes, colors, processing conditions and other functional ingredients on finished bakery products.
• Contribute to the development of clean-label bakery solutions as the company continues to expand its capabilities in this area.
• Support projects involving shelf-life extension and product stability, where relevant.
• Transfer successful formulations from bench/laboratory scale into commercial production.
• Work closely with manufacturing and operations teams during scale-up, production trials and troubleshooting.
• Provide technical support on the production floor when required to ensure formulations perform consistently at commercial scale.
• Prepare samples and prototypes for internal evaluation and customer projects.
• Occasionally interact directly with customer R&D and technical teams, including potential visits to customer manufacturing facilities to support trials or troubleshoot application challenges.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with R&D, Production, Quality, Sales and other internal teams throughout the product development and commercialization process.

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Food Science, Cereal Science, Bakery Science or a related discipline.
• Approximately 1-2+ years of relevant industry experience, although overall technical capability and directly relevant bakery experience will be considered more important than a specific number of years.
• Hands-on experience with bakery formulation, product development or bakery applications.
• Strong understanding of ingredient functionality within bakery systems.
• Experience performing formulation calculations and working with nutritional profiles.
• Understanding of baking processes and the impact of processing conditions on ingredient and finished-product performance.
• General working knowledge of enzymes, colors and functional bakery ingredients.
• Experience with dry-blended ingredient systems, premixes or bakery ingredient blends would be particularly relevant.
• Experience with clean-label formulation would be advantageous.
• Knowledge of shelf-life extension technologies or formulation approaches would also be beneficial.
• Experience supporting scale-up, technology transfer or commercial manufacturing trials is desirable.
• Comfortable working in a highly hands-on R&D environment and spending significant time in the laboratory and bakery applications setting.

The team is not necessarily looking for someone with a long academic or management background. The priority is finding a hands-on bakery scientist who understands how ingredients actually perform in formulation and during baking. Someone who can take a technical challenge, understand the functionality of the ingredients involved, formulate or reverse engineer a solution, run practical trials, evaluate the finished product and ultimately help transfer that formulation into commercial production would be particularly well…