OVERVIEW

The R&D Pastry Lead is a key role within Plain Vanilla’s Central Kitchen, responsible for driving pastry innovation, developing new products, and ensuring the highest standards of recipe documentation and quality. This position combines hands-on pastry expertise with structured research, testing, and training, ensuring that new products are successfully integrated into production and consistently delivered across all outlets.

REQUIREMENTS

• Diploma or higher in Pastry & Baking Arts or equivalent professional training is advantageous.
• Prior hands-on pastry experience required. Prior experience in an R&D or product development role is advantageous.
• Strong technical knowledge of pastry techniques, ingredients, and production scaling.
• Excellent documentation, training, and communication skills.
• Highly organised, detail-oriented, and able to balance creativity with operational feasibility.