Customer Success Manager

Customer Success Manager

Location: Irvine, CA, US, 92618 Employment Type: Salaried Work Arrangement: Remote Position Summary: As the Manager of Customer Success, you will play a strategic role in helping customers discover what's next in food and supporting them along their Food Innovation journey. Our Customer Success managers work at the intersection of consumer trends, culinary innovation, product development and commercialization. You'll help our customers bring new ideas to life - from identifying growth opportunities to supporting the development of innovative menu solutions. You'll collaborate with chefs, marketers, researchers, product development, supply chain and sales teams to turn insights into action and create meaningful business impact for our customers.

Major Duties and Responsibilities:

• Innovation Service Delivery: Delivers Ventura Foods' innovation services with consistency, excellence and impact. Partners with Culinary, Product Development, Marketing and Sales teams to identify emerging food trends, develop innovation concepts and deliver customer-ready solutions to drive growth. Creates experiences, supports brainstorms and ideations, which brings the message of food innovation and manufacturing expertise to life in innovative, memorable ways.
• Customer Account Management: Acts as the primary innovation contact for assigned customer accounts. Builds and maintains strong customer partnerships, increases strategic relationships with the key customers through proactive & regular innovation content. Blends analytical skills and confidence working with consumer and industry data sources with a natural curiosity within the food and innovation space. Enjoys working to uncover relevant consumer data that supports customer needs and discovers new opportunities and presents those opportunities in compelling ways.
• Project Management: Develops a strong understanding of product design, commercialization and the end-to-end innovation process to effectively guide customer opportunities from idea to reality. Works closely with Product Development, Culinary, Marketing and Sales teams to understand what it takes to successfully develop, launch and scale innovative solutions. Serves as an advocate for customer innovation projects, ensures concepts presented externally are grounded in operational feasibility and positioned for successful execution. Drives alignment, tracks project progress and helps transform insights into ideas and real-world outcomes.
• Communication Skills: Delivers food innovation, consumer and menu trends content aligned with an annual calendar, provides value-added and impactful insights to a broad customer base. Can synthesize insights from multiple sources into clear, compelling and actionable recommendations that resonate with customers and inspire action. Demonstrates exceptional written, verbal and presentation skills with the ability to craft impactful narratives.
• Cultural Fit: Contributes in promoting a culture of creativity and continuous improvement. Builds trusted relationships with customers. Collaborate across functions (Culinary, Product Development, Category Marketing, Research, Digital Marketing, Commercialization and Sales) to deliver against the customer needs. Works in a team environment, able to proactively bring stakeholders and cross-functional partners along.

Education and Experience: Bachelor's degree in Business, Marketing, Communications, or a related field, is required. 3+ years of experience in innovation, marketing, customer marketing, category management or sales with innovation project experience, is required. Experience with customer facing activity and engagement, is required. Ability to travel up to 25%. MBA is a plus. Experience working with national chain accounts, regional chain accounts, distributors, or food service operators is a bonus. Background in channel or insights driven marketing is nice to have. PMP certification would be good to have.

Knowledge and Skills: Strong interpersonal, verbal, written and presentation communication skills, along with relationship-building abilities. Strong planning and organization, project management and time management skills. Loves food, demonstrated interest in foodservice, restaurant and/or retail product innovation. Must be proficient with Microsoft Office applications. Comfortable working in fast paced, highly matrixed organizations. Strong problem-solving and analytical skills. Ability to work collaboratively in a remote environment.

Why Join Us: Ventura Foods innovates and manufactures food solutions for foodservice and retail businesses. We make exclusive products for the world's most iconic restaurants and retailers, we provide ready-to-go product solutions for professional kitchens, and we make consumer brands everyone knows and loves. When you work for Ventura Foods, you get a strong foundation of training, a manager who cares about you and celebrates your success, a safe environment, and challenging work. As part of our team, your future is limited only by how much you're willing to push yourself to get there. We invest in your growth because you invest in ours. Ventura Foods offers career growth opportunities as well as competitive compensation and benefits.

Salary Base Range of $109,060.95 - $171,773.09* Annual bonus (based on the incentive program terms and conditions) *The "base salary range" provided above is a good faith estimate of what we expect to pay for this position in the specified markets. Ventura Foods reserves the right to pay outside of the given range based on a variety of factors including but not limited to: candidate skills and experience, complexity of the job, budgetary factors, and location/geography. Ventura Foods conducts regular reviews of compensation ranges and therefore reserves the right to alter this range at any given time.

Our Culture reflects our commitment to treating every employee with respect and creating an environment where people can do their best work. We rely on a variety of strengths, backgrounds, and experiences across our teams to help us innovate, grow, and deliver for our customers. By fostering a workplace that is supportive, collaborative, and grounded in integrity, we continue to attract strong talent and meet the high expectations of a rapidly evolving marketplace. Ventura Foods is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, national origin, disability status, protected veteran status or any other characteristic protected by law.