Lead R&D Chef (Ready-To-Heat)

Home Chef • Chicago, IL

3d • $82,000 - $100,000

About The Position

Founded in 2013, Home Chef is the leading meal solutions company with both a retail and online presence. Available online at homechef.com and in retail at more than 2,100 Kroger grocery stores, Home Chef is committed to inspiring and enabling more people to cook simple, delicious meals, no matter how busy they are. In 2023, Home Chef introduced a new brand, Tempo ! Tempo features a rotating selection of ready-to-heat meals delivered directly to your door. These meals are better-for-you versions of familiar favorites, designed to save you time and reduce stress while maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Our Tempo menu includes options that are protein-packed, fiber-rich, calorie and carb conscious, keto-friendly, and dietitian-approved. Similar to our recipes, we recognize that variety is the spice of life, and therefore, our employees also bring their uniqueness and color to our fantastic team. We’re eager to work with humble team players and pragmatic next-level thinkers to innovate on Home Chef’s offerings. The Lead R&D Chef will work on our compound ingredients in the R&D kitchen to conceive and create new recipes for the Ready to Heat (RTH) Tempo offering that meet our nutritional, cost and ingredient specifications.

Requirements

• Completion of a two-year program such as an Associate degree: Culinary Arts or similar (Culinary degree preferred.)
• 6+ years experience working in a kitchen or other professional cooking environment.
• Able to work in a clean and organized manner.
• 2+ years prior recipe development experience.
• 2+ years prior experience with CPG and/or RTE foods.
• 2+ years experience successfully managing, training and developing direct reports
• Self-starter and highly motivated to provide our customers with the best meals possible
• A team-first collaborator who works well in group settings, is able to provide constructive feedback and actively supports the overall team workload
• Forward thinking mindset that leads to incremental improvement
• Quality-focused mindset
• Strong verbal communication skills
• Willing and able to receive feedback and implement suggestions
• Understanding of current nutrition, food and food industry trends.
• Must be able to taste and provide thorough feedback on every meal and ingredient sample test in the kitchen, including vegetarian, pork, chicken, steak, and seafood meals.

Nice To Haves

• ServSafe or food handling certification preferred

Responsibilities

• Compound Ingredient Development
• Passionate culinarian with a great palette, sense of presentation, and the ability to innovate and efficiently experiment with culinary concepts
• Conceive accessible, creative compound ingredient formulations in the test kitchen that apply to cost, ingredient pantry, caloric/nutritional, time, and operational constraints
• Responsible for the creation and reformulation of about 60 CIs per quarter
• Collaborate with other chefs to improve and test each CI, from benchtop to scaled samples
• Utilize extensive and honest feedback every day on accessibility, flavors and operational viability and incorporate this data into best in class formulations
• Collaborate closely with cross functional partners (production, fsqa, procurement, marketing, etc) with a focus on customer satisfaction and operational complexity
• Drive for higher customer ratings and satisfaction with Tempo
• Respond to directives from Culinary, Marketing, NPD, and RTH teams to develop meals that will contribute to increased sales
• Use feedback from production teams to increase efficiency and and decrease operational complexity
• Optimize your expertise to produce an end product that can be scaled with proper taste, texture, shelf life, appearance, and cost
• Ability to innovate and implement ideas that can improve individual R&D, team workflows and Tempo as a brand
• Innovate ideas and execute them
• Work with menu strategy to ideate new CIs
• Generate CI concepts based on menu needs and Tempo team strategy
• Build out concepts in a way that they can be executed by members of the CI team
• Build a pipeline of CIs to reformulate and complete CI concepts to be scheduled for R&D
• Meet or exceed expectations of the quarterly CI roadmap
• Manage work flow of direct report(s)
• Provide CI formulations to direct report(s)
• Offer guidance on execution CI R&D
• Give feedback and direction on changes to make to next iteration of CIs
• Take the lead in CI R&D through scheduling, training and offering direction to CI R&D team
• Responsible for driving CI R&D team towards output and quality goals
• Work with menu strategy and Tempo Ops teams to ensure that CI output is focused on the current needs of the menu and production
• Coordinate with Culinary and Ops associates to ensure that ingredients needed for R&D are in-house
• Evaluate Customer Feedback
• Thoroughly understand how the average customer interacts with the product and strive to make CIs that facilitate the creation of accessible and delicious meals
• Analyze customer comments on meals from menu runs and incorporate learnings into new recipes
• Integrate learnings from various data sets to improve meal performance
• Meeting Participation
• Attend and participate in weekly Culinary and RTH team meetings including Performance Board, Team Check-ins, RTH Draft, Weekly Culinary/Production Debrief, etc.
• Visit production facilities as needed to train and to improve execution
• New Meal R&D
• R&D meals as needed to refine CIs or to meet menu strategy directives

Benefits

• Candidates can experience Home Chef as a customer - enter promo code PEOPLE30 for $30 off your first order!
• Medical, dental, vision, life and disability insurance available
• Paid holidays, sick time and vacation time
• 401k program
• Flexible spending accounts for qualified medical, dependent care, parking, or transit expenses

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: Associate degree
• Number of Employees: 1,001-5,000 employees