Product Developer

at  Greencore Group

WHY GREENCORE?

We’re a leading manufacturer of convenience food in the UK and our purpose is to make every day taste better.
We’re a vibrant, fast-paced leading food manufacturer. Employing around 13,600 colleagues across 16 manufacturing units and 17 distribution depots across the UK. We supply all the UK’s food retailers with everything from Sandwiches, soups and sushi to cooking sauces, pickles and ready meals, and in FY23, we generated revenues of £1.9bn.
Our vast direct-to-store (DTS) distribution network, comprising of 17 depots nationwide, enables us to make over 10,400 daily deliveries of our own chilled and frozen produce and that of third parties.

We have an interim opportunity for a Product Developer to join our team at Kiveton. This will be for a period of 12 months to cover maternity.
As a Product Developer, your role will be to develop new, and modify existing products, in line with written briefs, customer expectations and financial targets to create products of sustainable and repeatable quality and sustainable cost.

In this role you will be required to:

• Develop new and existing recipes into commercially viable products, benchmarking regularly to gain awareness of the market for a competitive advantage.
• Create recipes alongside the chefs, input recipes onto the recipe management system and review the accuracy of all recipes inputted by the product technologist and chefs to ensure they meet cost, weight and nutritional requirements.
• Ensure the viability of new raw ingredients from an operational, technical and product development perspective to bring innovation and challenge to existing Greencore policies and practices.
• Complete and/or review and approve all relevant documentation (feasibility forms, customer submission forms, concept to process handovers etc.) to ensure accuracy of information shared internally and externally.
• Put all products through the feasibility process; working with the commercial, operations, technical and purchasing teams to solve any issues to ensure concepts are repeatable, sustainable and scalable.
• Compile product costing information and adapt recipes to balance food quality with achievement of commercial brief targets within customer brand standards.
• Present benchmarking, existing (EPD) and new products (NPD) at internal and customer presentations, passionately demonstrate good market and food trends awareness, to achieve product approval.
• Follow the critical path time lines as directed, escalating incomplete tasks and deficiencies in testing, to ensure that mitigating action can be taken to prevent delays in product acceptance and launch.
• Assist the process team with the scale up production trials, as required, to ensure production quality matches the kitchen quality signed off by the customer.
• Provide leadership and direct to ensure that across the team people are kept safe, engaged, focused, developed an delivery to their potential.