R&D Director, Global Dairy Ingredients

Land O'Lakes•Arden Hills, MN

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

Land O’Lakes is seeking an 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.

Requirements

M.S. in Food Science, Dairy Science, Chemistry, Chemical Engineering, or related field required
15+ years of progressive R&D, product development, and technical leadership experience in food, dairy, or ingredients.
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.

Nice To Haves

Ph.D. and/or MBA preferred.
Direct experience with dairy proteins, spray drying, and membrane filtration strongly preferred.

Responsibilities

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.