Scientist - Bakery Applications & Product Development

Location: North Jersey
Working Pattern: Fully On-Site
Industry: Bakery Ingredients / Food Ingredients / Ingredient Systems

The Opportunity

An established food ingredients manufacturer is looking to add a Scientist - Bakery Applications & Product Development to its R&D team in North Jersey.

This is a highly hands-on position focused on the development, formulation and application of dry-blended bakery ingredient systems for commercial customers.

Approximately 75% of the role will be laboratory and applications focused, making this particularly suited to a food scientist who enjoys being hands-on with ingredients, formulations and baking trials rather than working primarily behind a desk.

The successful candidate will work across new product development, customer-specific formulations, product optimization and technology transfer, helping take concepts from the laboratory through to commercial production.

Key Responsibilities

* Develop and optimize dry-blended bakery ingredient formulations for customer-specific and internally driven innovation projects.

* Conduct hands-on mixing, formulation, baking trials, sample preparation, testing and sensory evaluation.

* Understand ingredient functionality and determine how individual ingredients interact within different bakery systems.

* Perform formulation calculations, nutritional calculations and product evaluations to support new and existing products.

* Support reverse engineering and reformulation projects, evaluating existing products and developing alternative or improved ingredient systems.

* Evaluate the impact of enzymes, colors, processing conditions and other functional ingredients on finished bakery products.

* Contribute to the development of clean-label bakery solutions as the company continues to expand its capabilities in this area.

* Support projects involving shelf-life extension and product stability, where relevant.

* Transfer successful formulations from bench/laboratory scale into commercial production.

* Work closely with manufacturing and operations teams during scale-up, production trials and troubleshooting.

* Provide technical support on the production floor when required to ensure formulations perform consistently at commercial scale.

* Prepare samples and prototypes for internal evaluation and customer projects.

* Occasionally interact directly with customer R&D and technical teams, including potential visits to customer manufacturing facilities to support trials or troubleshoot application challenges.

* Collaborate cross-functionally with R&D, Production, Quality, Sales and other internal teams throughout the product development and commercialization process.

Ideal Background

* Bachelor's or Master's degree in Food Science, Cereal Science, Bakery Science or a related discipline.

* Approximately 1-2+ years of relevant industry experience, although overall technical capability and directly relevant bakery experience will be considered more important than a specific number of years.

* Hands-on experience with bakery formulation, product development or bakery applications.

* Strong understanding of ingredient functionality within bakery systems.

* Experience performing formulation calculations and working with nutritional profiles.

* Understanding of baking processes and the impact of processing conditions on ingredient and finished-product performance.

* General working knowledge of enzymes, colors and functional bakery ingredients.

* Experience with dry-blended ingredient systems, premixes or bakery ingredient blends would be particularly relevant.

* Experience with clean-label formulation would be advantageous.

* Knowledge of shelf-life extension technologies or formulation approaches would also be beneficial.

* Experience supporting scale-up, technology transfer or commercial manufacturing trials is desirable.

* Comfortable working in a highly hands-on R&D environment and spending significant time in the laboratory and bakery applications setting.

What They Are Looking For

The team is not necessarily looking for someone with a long academic or management background. The priority is finding a hands-on bakery scientist who understands how ingredients actually perform in formulation and during baking.

Someone who can take a technical challenge, understand the functionality of the ingredients involved, formulate or reverse engineer a solution, run practical trials, evaluate the finished product and ultimately help transfer that formulation into commercial production would be particularly well suited.

Candidates currently based in New Jersey or the surrounding New York/New Jersey area are strongly preferred due to the fully on-site nature of the position.