New Product Development Manager

Job Description

NPD Manager 

Location: Fife, WA 

Position Location: 100% Onsite 

Wage: $88,000-$104,000

About the Position 

The NPD Manager is the technical lead for all New Product development across Brown & Haley’s portfolio of candy, industrial ingredients, and nut bar products. This role will lead new product development projects from concept through commercialization, ensuring products meet business, customer, manufacturing, and food safety requirements. 

Ownership of New Product development funnel to production launch 

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• Work collaboratively with marketing team to continuously analyze market conditions and find consumer/brand fit points. 
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• Develop and maintain an NPD innovation funnel with go/no-go gates. 
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• Work with outside co-manufacturers when relevant to learning what’s available and expand the diversity of Brown & Haley’s portfolio.  
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• Product creation and documentation: Develop new confection items and improve existing ones for retail sale in our R&D Lab Kitchen, using a solid background in chocolate and cooked sugar products such as brittle, toffees and hard candy. Record formulations, processes and results accurately for every item. 
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• Scale-up support: Work with production engineers in the capacity of food sciences to take approved benchtop samples into full commercial production. Troubleshoot ingredient, process and quality issues so each product matches its benchtop version at scale. 
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• Work end-to-end with internal and external manufacturers’ appointed personnel to launch new products, pushing through the pain points to ensure the product meets customer and consumer expectations, and that the plant can manufacture it cost effectively. 
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• Lead bench development, culinary gold-standard creation, plant trials, first-production runs, and post-launch product evaluations. Includes working hands-on in the company test kitchen to develop new product concepts. 
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• Design and execute experiments, analyze data, draw conclusions, and make sound technical recommendations to support product and process decisions. 
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Continuous Learning 

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• Maintain and continuously update knowledge on Food Science, candy making, and consumer preferences. 
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• Function as the company’s lead technical person when it comes to Food Science. Represent the company in this regard in customer meetings, product presentations, commercialization reviews, and internal technical discussions. 
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• Support manufacturing with production functionality issues with foundational Food Science principles. 
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• Essential Duties and Responsibilities include the following. Other duties, responsibilities, and activities may change or be assigned at any time with or without notice. To perform this job successfully, an individual must be able to perform each essential duty satisfactorily.  
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Additional Responsibilities include but are not limited to the following:  

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• Responsible for Food Safety. 
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• Other duties as assigned. 
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Position Requirements  

The requirements listed below are representative of the knowledge, skill, and/or ability required. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities. 

Education: 

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• Food Science, Culinary Science, Culinology, or Chemical Engineering degree or equivalent education or experience. 
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• Project Management Certificate (preferred). 
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Related Experience: 

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• Minimum of 3-5 years’ executing NPD projects for a Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) brand. 
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• Demonstrated experience developing candy, chocolate, confections, or related CPG food products preferred. 
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• Knowledge of confection functionality (i.e. tempering, enrobing, panning, etc) 
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Certifications and Credentials: 

PCQI (Preventive Controls Qualified Individual) certification preferred, or willingness to obtain within the first 12 months. 

Competencies:  

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• Must be competent in use of one or more AI models to manipulate data and draft documentation required. 
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• Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams required. 
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• Moderate skills in AI-assisted programming in Python preferred. 
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• Complex problem solving. 
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• Attention to detail. 
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• Effective communication and collaboration skills. This individual will work cross-functionally with marketing, sales, production, and external manufacturers. They need to have the skills to build rapport with all of these groups. 
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