Lead CI R&D Chef, RTH

Founded in 2013, Home Chef is the leading meal solutions company with both a retail and online presence. Available online at homechef.com and in retail at more than 2,100 Kroger grocery stores, Home Chef is committed to inspiring and enabling more people to cook simple, delicious meals, no matter how busy they are.

In 2023, Home Chef introduced a new brand, Tempo! Tempo features a rotating selection of ready-to-heat meals delivered directly to your door. These meals are better-for-you versions of familiar favorites, designed to save you time and reduce stress while maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Our Tempo menu includes options that are protein-packed, fiber-rich, calorie and carb conscious, keto-friendly, and dietitian-approved.

Similar to our recipes, we recognize that variety is the spice of life, and therefore, our employees also bring their uniqueness and color to our fantastic team. We’re eager to work with humble team players and pragmatic next-level thinkers to innovate on Home Chef’s offerings.

The Lead CI R&D Chef - RTH will work in the R&D kitchen(s) to conceive and create new recipes for the Ready to Heat (RTH) Home Chef offering that meet our nutritional, cost and ingredient specifications. 

Detailed Responsibilities

Compound Ingredient Development

• Passionate culinarian with a great palette, sense of presentation, and the ability to innovate and efficiently experiment with culinary concepts
• Conceive accessible, creative compound ingredient formulations in the test kitchen that apply to cost, ingredient pantry, caloric/nutritional, time, and operational  constraints
• Responsible for the creation and reformulation of about 60 CIs per quarter
• Collaborate with other chefs to improve and test each CI, from benchtop to scaled samples
• Utilize extensive and honest feedback every day on accessibility, flavors and operational viability and incorporate this data into best in class formulations
• Collaborate closely with cross functional partners (production, fsqa, procurement, marketing, etc) with a focus on customer satisfaction and operational complexity
• Drive for higher customer ratings and satisfaction with Tempo
• Respond to directives from Culinary, Marketing, NPD, and RTH teams to develop meals that will contribute to increased sales
• Use feedback from production teams to increase efficiency and and decrease operational complexity
• Optimize your expertise to produce an end product that can be scaled with proper taste, texture, shelf life, appearance, and cost
• Ability to innovate and implement ideas that can improve individual R&D, team workflows and Tempo as a brand
• Innovate ideas and execute them

Work with menu strategy to ideate new CIs

• Generate CI concepts based on menu needs and Tempo team strategy
• Build out concepts in a way that they can be executed by members of the CI team
• Build a pipeline of CIs to reformulate and complete CI concepts to be scheduled for R&D
• Meet or exceed expectations of the quarterly CI roadmap

Manage work flow of direct report(s)

• Provide CI formulations to direct report(s)
• Offer guidance on execution CI R&D
• Give feedback and direction on changes to make to next iteration of CIs
• Take the lead in CI R&D through scheduling, training and offering direction to CI R&D team
• Responsible for driving CI R&D team towards output and quality goals
• Work with menu strategy and Tempo Ops teams to ensure that CI output is focused on the current needs of the menu and production
• Coordinate with Culinary and Ops associates to ensure that ingredients needed for R&D are in-house

Evaluate Customer Feedback

• Thoroughly understand how the average customer interacts with the product and strive to make CIs that facilitate the creation of accessible and delicious meals
• Analyze customer comments on meals from menu runs and incorporate learnings into new recipes
• Integrate learnings from various data sets to improve meal performance

Meeting Participation

• Attend and participate in weekly Culinary and RTH team meetings including Performance Board, Team Check-ins, RTH Draft, Weekly Culinary/Production Debrief, etc.
• Visit production facilities as needed to train and to improve execution

New Meal R&D

• R&D meals as needed to refine CIs or to meet menu strategy directives

This position requires about 25% travel.