Culinary Innovation Manager

Crown Bakeries•Smyrna, GA

1d•Onsite

About The Position

The Culinary Innovation Manager is a customer-facing innovation leader responsible for translating market trends and customer ideation into commercially viable bakery products. This role combines culinary creativity, technical bakery expertise, and sales partnership to drive growth through differentiated product innovation. This position maintains full product development responsibility from concept through commercialization, and owns the development and documentation of product specifications to ensure operational excellence and product consistency across manufacturing.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Food Science, Culinary Science, Bakery Science, or related field (required).
7+ years of bakery product development experience (commercial wholesale bakery preferred).
Demonstrated experience in customer-facing innovation or sales support role.
Strong understanding of bakery ingredient functionality and commercial production processes.
Experience developing detailed product specifications and quality parameters.
Proven ability to translate trends into scalable formulations.
Strong presentation, communication, and documentation skills.
Hands-on bench development experience required.
Willingness to travel to manufacturing plants and customer sites as needed

Responsibilities

Lead ideation, formulation, and development of new bakery products, flavor profiles, and platforms across buns, rolls, breads, and value-added baked goods
Partner with Sales to support customer meetings, ideation sessions, and strategic innovation presentations.
Translate market trends, customer insights, and consumer needs into commercially viable product concepts
Lead collaborative ideation sessions to identify whitespace opportunities and pipeline initiatives.
Present product concepts, trend insights, and finished samples to leadership with strong culinary storytelling and technical credibility.
Support customer sample requests and innovation pipelines aligned with growth objectives.
Monitor emerging culinary, flavor, format, and ingredient trends in bakery and adjacent categories.
Conduct competitive benchmarking and marketplace analysis to inform innovation strategy.
Proactively develop trend-forward concepts to support rotating pipeline offerings.
Serve as internal subject matter expert on bakery trends and evolving guest experience expectations.
Lead development of new bakery products and line extensions from concept through commercialization.
Develop bench prototypes and conduct hands-on lab work including mixing, baking, scaling, and troubleshooting formulas.
Ensure formulations are scalable, cost-aligned, and operationally feasible for commercial production.
Partner with Operations, Quality, and Supply Chain to support plant trials, commercialization runs, and start-ups.
Troubleshoot product or process challenges during scale-up and early production cycles.
Develop, document, and maintain final product specifications for all bakery products.
Establish and define gold standard specifications, including target sensory, physical, and performance attributes.
Define acceptable variance parameters for production to guide operational quality control.
Document key product characteristics such as weight, dimensions, moisture, texture, appearance, flavor profile, and shelf-life expectations.
Collaborate with Operations and Quality teams to ensure specifications are clear, measurable, and executable in manufacturing environments.
Update specifications as needed based on continuous improvement initiatives or market feedback.
Monitor product performance post-launch to identify optimization opportunities.
Partner cross-functionally to enhance product quality, shelf-life, cost structure, and overall guest experience.
Drive continuous improvement initiatives to maintain competitive differentiation.