Associate Manager Foods Product Development

ABOUT THE ROLE
Cooking Aids and Mini Meals is a critical pillar within Unilever’s Food business, anchored by Knorr Bouillon as one of the strongest growth engines in the North America portfolio. Bouillon is central to Knorr’s ambition to lead flavor, confident cooking, modern convenience, and premiumization for today’s consumers.
As the Bouillon Pillar Lead for the CAMM R&D team, this role will lead the North America bouillon technical agenda. The role will own day-to-day R&D delivery across bouillon projects, shape and maintain the innovation roadmap, and ensure key technologies from the Global R&D team landed with speed, quality, and strong cross-functional alignment.

We are seeking a proactive and experienced R&D product development leader to own the Bouillon pillar within the North America CAMM R&D team. This role will provide technical leadership across the bouillon portfolio, including granulated bouillon, cubes, pastes, flavor bases, bone broth, premium platforms, and future bouillon formats. The Bouillon Pillar Lead will be accountable for translating the CAMM business strategy and global technology roadmap into a clear, executable North America innovation and renovation agenda. The role will lead projects from opportunity framing through commercialization, ensure strong technical rigor and risk management, and partner closely with Brand, CTI, Culinary, Supply Chain, Regulatory, Quality, Procurement, Finance, suppliers, and the BG R&D team to deliver consumer-relevant, cost-effective, scalable, and resilient products.

Key Responsibilities:

• Lead the CAMM bouillon pillar as the primary R&D owner for the North America bouillon portfolio, ensuring clear priorities, strong technical direction, and disciplined delivery across active projects.
• Own and maintain the bouillon innovation and renovation roadmap, connecting consumer needs, category strategy, technical feasibility, regulatory requirements, and business value.
• Lead technical delivery for priority bouillon projects, including concept development, formulation strategy, prototype development, technical risk assessment, factory trials, scale-up, documentation, and commercialization readiness.
• Partner with the BG R&D team to land key global technologies in North America, adapting platforms for local consumer, regulatory, supply chain, cost, quality, and manufacturing needs.
• Build a clear pipeline of future bouillon opportunities across premiumization, wellness, convenience, flavor leadership, resiliency, simplification, and cost optimization.
• Serve as the technical partner to Brand, CTI, Culinary, Supply Chain, Regulatory, Quality, Procurement, Finance, and suppliers, ensuring projects are consumer-led, technically robust, and commercially viable.
• Drive project governance, milestone management, issue resolution, and proactive risk escalation to ensure bouillon projects progress on time and in full.
• Develop and approve raw material, recipe, process, and finished product specifications in alignment with internal systems and required technical standards.
• Strengthen bouillon technical capability within the CAMM R&D team by codifying learnings, building knowledge assets, and coaching teammates on platforms, processes, and critical technical principles.

Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in Food Science, Food Engineering, Chemical Engineering, or a related technical field.
• Proven experience in product development, preferably across savory foods, bouillon, seasonings, sauces, soups, or adjacent dry and wet culinary formats.
• Strong project leadership skills with the ability to manage multiple innovation, renovation, and business-support projects simultaneously.
• Demonstrated ability to lead cross-functional teams, influence stakeholders, and communicate technical decisions with clarity.
• Strong technical judgment, problem-solving capability, and ability to balance consumer, business, regulatory, quality, cost, supply chain, and manufacturing requirements.

Preferred Skills:

• Experience with bouillon, savory flavor systems, culinary bases, dehydration, paste processing, cubes, granulation, or related technologies.
• Strong understanding of ingredient functionality, formulation design, sensory evaluation, shelf-life testing, product specifications, and scale-up principles.
• Ability to translate global technology platforms into locally relevant, commercially viable products for North America.
• Comfort working with digital R&D systems, data analysis, technical documentation, and structured project management tools.
• Highly collaborative style with the ability to build trust across local, regional, global, and external partner teams.
• Proactive ownership mindset, with strong follow-through, timely escalation, and clear communication.
• Ability to simplify complexity, prioritize what matters, and make progress in ambiguous or fast-moving environments.
• Positive, resilient, can-do attitude with the ability to deliver high-quality work within tight timelines.

Pay: The pay range for this position is $88,600 to $133,000. Unilever takes into consideration a wide range of factors that are utilized in making compensation decisions including, but not limited to, skill sets, experience and training, licensure and certifications, qualifications and education, and other business and organizational needs. 

Bonus: This position is bonus eligible. 

Benefits: Unilever employees are eligible to participate in our benefits plan. Should the employee choose to participate, they can choose from a range of benefits to include, but is not limited to, health insurance (including prescription drug, dental, and vision coverage), retirement savings benefits, life insurance and disability benefits, parental leave, sick leave, paid vacation and holidays, as well as access to numerous voluntary benefits. Any coverages for health insurance and retirement benefits will be in accordance with the terms and conditions of the applicable plans and associated governing plan documents. 

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