Director – Research & Development Jobs

Business Unit Overview

Bob Evans Farms operates in multiple convenience foods categories within grocery and club. It holds #1 market positions in three major categories. This winning brand has been experiencing strong growth, a trend it's expecting to continue mostly through its leadership in the refrigerated dinner and breakfast categories. Bob Evans Farms products are distributed nationally in retailers throughout North America.

Position Overview:

This senior-level R&D position will be responsible for the development and deployment of ongoing innovative, safe, and high-quality products, ensuring / maintaining the relevancy of leading consumer brands. This leader will lead and develop a team of technical professionals. The successful candidate will help create an environment that fosters innovation in developing new products, creating improvements on existing products or services. He/she will collaborate with other departments within the company — such as sales, marketing, engineering, manufacturing, procurement, and supply chain.

Accountabilities:

• Stays on top of relevant trends through individual research, seminars and maintaining a network of professional, business, and industrial contacts.
• Creates and maintains an environment of technical excellence, innovation know-how, consumer insight and entrepreneurial spirit to support and excel business and R&D team.
• Develop and grow a pipeline of strong RD technical specialists through effective coaching, mentoring, performance management and organizational design/development
• Responsible for completing job duties in a manner that supports all plant safety, food safety, quality, and environmental practices.
• Project leadership: leads, mentors, develops, and manages R&D staff of scientists, engineers and technicians to achieve annual goals.
• Provide financial budget and recommend/justify R&D related capital expenditures related to business unit.
• Ensures resource allocation is appropriate and aligned with business partners.
• Work closely with co-manufacturers’ R&D departments to facilitate product innovation / commercialization.
• Identifies improvement opportunities, constraints, hurdles, or gaps and will act upon them and/or provide recommendations to business.
• Ensures that work projects and processes support overall vision and are aligned with process, business strategies, standards, and practices
• Partners with internal functions in developing sound project decisions; from starting projects through development and implementation.

Skills:

• Effectively work in a team environment (cross-functional teams, both internal and external resources) through excellent interpersonal, influencing and communication skills (both written and verbal)
• Ability to travel to various sites e.g. project exploration/implementation at third parties/co-mans.
• Ability to excel in dynamic fast paced business environment, demonstrated ability to self-motivate and manage multiple priorities
• Ability to execute and/or oversee execution of projects within timelines and meet/exceed project targets.
• Demonstrated ability to manage direct reports effectively.
• In-depth knowledge of food science, ingredients, food processing, packaging technologies as they relate to consumer acceptability and direct ingredient-to-food contact surface interfaces, and project management.

Experience:

Required: Minimum 10 years’ experience in Food industry, which includes substantial experience in R&D, New Product Development, Product Commercialization, Project Management and/or product/process improvement experience. Experience leading direct reports and working in cross-functional teams and with third party resources is required.

Education Level:

Required: BS Food Science, Food Engineering, Chemical Engineering or similar disciplines.

Preferred: Advanced degree in a related field is highly preferred.