Senior Manager, Snacks, Bakery & Confectionery Applications

About Ingredion:

Join Ingredion, where innovation impacts lives worldwide! Without even realizing it, you’ve experienced our work in your favorite chocolate, your pet’s food, the paper you write on, and your everyday snacks. As a global powerhouse across more than 60 industries, we harness the potential of natural ingredients to transform lives. Whether you’re just starting your career or bringing years of experience, there's a place for you here to make a real difference. Be part of our team that values a wide range of perspectives and is committed to shaping a better world with every product we create.

Location: Bridgewater, NJ

Workplace type: On-Site/Hybrid (4 days/week on-site & 1 day/week remote)

The Senior Manager, Snacks, Bakery and Confectionery is responsible for driving food product development and formulation expertise across multiple Snacks, Bakery and Confectionery sub-categories globally. They will provide technical category leadership for the development and commercialization of new ingredients and innovative formulation solutions across multiple geographies.  

The Senior Manager will collaborate with our geography Customer Innovation leaders and customers to protect and grow our global Snacks, Bakery and Confectionery category business, providing leadership to translate customer insights and value propositions into technical solutions that meet consumer needs, promote health and sustainability, and support customer breakthroughs. You will be able to navigate ambiguity, working closely with global technical and commercial functions to identify and capture growth opportunities, creating end-to-end formulation technologies and ingredient solutions that maximize customer value.

The Sr. Manager will advance product development and applications excellence in the Snacks, Bakery and Confectionery categories, lead the creation of technology roadmaps at the sub-category level (including Sweet Biscuits, Bread, Bars, Extruded Snacks) grounded on a deep understanding of articulated and latent customer and consumer needs. You will collaborate with global technical teams to create, assess, and validate new formulations and innovative ingredient solutions for consumer-packaged goods, private label and foodservice customers. The candidate will lead, mentor and develop a team of scientists and create an environment that fosters innovation and promotes effective product development and food design from conceptualization to finished product scale-up for the Snacks, Bakery and Confectionery categories.

What You'll do:

• Build a deep understanding of Snacks, Bakery and Confectionery category consumer trends, customer problems and unmet needs through close cross-functional collaboration with category teams and global partners including Marketing and Insights.
• Create strong networks that promote collaboration among the global Snacks, Bakery and Confectionery community of expertise and build depth of the technical team.
• Translate voice of customer and key customer value propositions to technical solutions in collaboration with key stakeholders including sales, marketing, measurement science, and process innovation to make our customer’s breakthroughs possible.
• Lead, grow, and create an environment to empower talented technical professionals through mentoring and meaningful career development planning. Identify gaps and develop new technical capabilities and expertise among the team.
• Develop and implement a 3-year technical strategy roadmap working with global teams to identify and bring new ingredients to market, formulating solutions for Snacks, Bakery and Confectionery applications.
• Provide Snacks, Bakery and Confectionery category thought leadership through a broad understanding of the categories and the current and future drivers, as well as the corresponding technical capabilities to deliver differentiated food products and customer value.
• Develop new Snacks, Bakery and Confectionery formulation concepts leveraging ingredients and processes which can be applied globally. Harness industry expertise to develop and commercialize new ingredients and technologies grounded on customer insights.
• Drive recognition of Ingredion’s innovation capabilities at key industry engagements and establish thought leadership through industry innovation events and key industry organization meetings with customers globally.
• Champion and support Ingredion’s Intellectual Property strategy and develop patent applications. Stay abreast of Snacks, Bakery and Confectionery formulation science technologies and category landscape (market trends, IP landscape, emerging technologies). Communicate to the organization threats and opportunities in the categor