Product Development & Support Manager

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About Vandemoortele

Vandemoortele is a leading European food group that brings tasty solutions to consumers & customers, and manufactures high-quality food products. Vandemoortele has two business lines: frozen bakery products and margarines, culinary oils and fats, and drives it with sustainable entrepreneurship.

“Shaping a tasty future”, with passion for taste & indulgence: that makes working at Vandemoortele attractive: you will get all the chances to grow within a people oriented and value driven environment, where cooperation, respect and ambition are key. With headquarters based in Belgium you will be part of an international company having a dynamic, driven, ambitious and collegial atmosphere. We believe a more organic, flexible culture leads to a healthier work-life balance, motivates employees and ensures that we can work well together towards even better outcomes.

You will participate in a culture built on thrust, empowerment, self-management and shared leadership, where we all share the same sense of responsibility to getting the job done.

In 2021, Vandemoortele realized a turnover of ca 1,33 billion euro. The Group is present in 12 European countries with 5,100 employees. The Vandemoortele headquarters are located in Ghent, Belgium.

For our R&D site based in Izegem, we are currently looking for a Product Development & Support Manager.

Your key responsibilities and challenges are:

Project leader of new product developments in MCOF (= Margarines, Culinary Oils & Fats). As Project Leader you are the driver to develop customer demands or ideas into a MCOF product, which includes:

• You discuss and guard the project scope (define the desired product characteristics) and report on the project status regularly with all project stakeholders.
• You translate the project goal into a technical product definition.
• You plan, follow up and interpret lab analysis.
• You plan and follow up pilot trials and industrial scale-up trials in production.
• Depending on the application you organize bakery application trials, sensory testing, frying tests… with our technicians to evaluate product performance
• You initiate cost price quotations and draft technical data sheets.
• You get approval of the customer/commercials concerning the developed product (product characteristics, cost price, ingredient declaration,…)
• You collect and manage all necessary data and inform departments accordingly (production, quality, masterdata,…) in order to launch the new product.
• Finally, you follow up the first productions to ensure the new product is produced according to the specifications agreed upon during the development.

Develop expertise in several applications/characteristics of MCOF:

• You are in charge for the follow up of competitor products and market trends.
• You play a role in innovative projects with challenges as clean label, sustainability and nutrition in close cooperation with our senior technical application experts.
• You implement in the different factories the output of the Science and Technology team like new guidelines, processing tools, optimization in ingredients and formula.
• You give technical support to the commercial teams and you organize or assist in customer visits to Vandemoortele or technical visits to the customer.
• You know and have a good understanding of the plant capabilities and processing conditions.
• You are able to keep a helicopter view of the ongoing projects in the defined product group.
• You build up specific technical knowledge through contacts with suppliers & customers, internal networking and literature, patents, seminars, institutes etc.

Major R&D Projects:

• Next to the challenging responsibilities above, you also participate in important R&D projects, including projects outside of the direct scope of the function.

R&D Systems:

• Finally, you develop and manage the R&D systems (recipe management, cost calculation, new ingredients…) and procedures.

About you

• You have a Master’s degree in Business Administration, Marketing, or related field.
• Passionate about good, tasty food.
• Customer-centric mindset
• Solid 10 year+ of channel marketing experience is a must
• Retail sales experience is a plus
• Data-driven, you bring optimizations based on fact-based analysis
• Strong business acumen, knows how to prioritize and focus for impact
• Solid Project Management skills, and a good eye for details
• Embraces change in pursuit of continuous growth for the organization, acts as a catalyst for strategic project acceleration
• Excellent Communication, presentation and convincing skills, is a great stakeholder manager, in English, other languages are a plus
• Great team player, and strong networker enjoys cross-functional way-of-working, and brings people together behind a vision

What we offer you

We offer you challenging work with a great purpose in an international company having a dynamic, driven and ambitious culture and a collegial atmosphere. You will get all chances to grow within a people oriented and value driven environment, where cooperation, respect and ambition are key.