Director, Growth & Innovation

Job Description

Job Description

Position Description:

Reporting to the South Chicago Packing Division President, this role will lead the development and implementation of the growth and innovation effort. This role will help shape commercial growth plans, own management of the product portfolio, directly lead the R&D and Culinary team, and strengthen South Chicago Packing’s commercialization processes to execute growth projects with speed and excellence. This will be a high impact role that works collaboratively across Sales, Operations, QA, Finance, and Supply Chain departments. The right candidate will be comfortable in the “fuzzy front end” of innovation while applying a strong process and structured approach to build repeatable results. This role will serve on the South Chicago Packing Leadership Team.

Primary Responsibilities:

Portfolio & Product Development

• Drive the exploration and early-stage business development initiatives for untapped markets, channels, and categories.
• Lead a high performing Innovation team, leveraging grounded insight to ideation, culinary gold-standard benchmarks, R&D technical expertise, and strong project commercialization partnered with South Chicago Packing Operations team to deliver revenue growth.
• Deliver profitable growth with a robust innovation pipeline built on meaningful value propositions for the target market.
• Strengthen food science and nutrition credentials of South Chicago Packing – developing organizational technical and product expertise of fats & lipids
• Provide Process Engineering expertise to cross-functional project teams in the research, recommendation, procurement, and implementation of new equipment and processes that support the innovation platform and the advancement of core product development.
• Partner with Commercial leads for Consumer (B2C) and Business to Business (B2B) sectors to commercialize innovation supporting annual operating plan (AOP) and long-range plan (LRP) objectives.
• Develop strong processes for product and packaging management, such as label design, regulatory & marketing claims, packaging graphics, and product specifications.
• Work closely with customer, quality and operations teams to understand data requirements and ensure that master data supports key business processes.

Research and Category Development

• Collaborate with Sales, Finance, and Operations leadership in the development of long-term and annual operating plans.
• Champion category growth through product knowledge of the fats & oils industry and demonstrate trusted leadership through product training with selling and industry partners.
• Lead and execute the exploration and implementation of new equipment, technologies, innovative processes, and capabilities that drive platform-based innovation while also enhancing the performance and value of the existing product portfolio.
• Develop culinary solutions and product training to grow customer engagement at key accounts.
• Partner with Commercial leads and Marketing Agency to build brand and channel activation plans and toolkits.
• Support Sales leadership to refine the Customer Journey and contribute to new business development.
• Perform other duties as assigned.

Consumer, Customer & Market Insight

• Provide commercial thought leadership that consistently evolves product portfolio strategy in line with industry trends, fosters new capabilities, and embeds a culture of growth and continuous improvement across South Chicago Packing.
• Aggregate and share market, consumer, customer, and competitive insights to support the commercial strategy and drive business development efforts.
• Amplify South Chicago Packing’s role in the industry, strengthening professional trade association networks, work with culinary partners, and food science and nutrition institutions.
• Champion a food culture inside the company, monitoring relevant menu trends and applications.

Supervisory/Management Responsibilities:

• Build clear roles and ways of working across the Innovation Team (Culinary, R&D) and with key cross functional partners (QA, Operations, Marketing, Sales, Finance).
• Establish a high-performance and talent development framework: balancing technical and leadership capability to create career pathways and future Miniat Company leaders.
• Contribute to the South Chicago Packing Leadership Team by fostering a performance driven culture that embodies the core values of the Miniat Company.

Requirements:

• Bachelor’s degree in Food Science, Business, Agriculture Science or relevant experience
• Strong thought leader who is curious about the business to drive results.
• 10 years minimum culinary, innovation, R&D, or marketing experience; preferably in a food manufacturing business.
• Previous experience building a successful innovation and growth practice; both creating a vision and actively hands-on with the work.
• Excellent interpersonal and communication skills.
• Enjoys developing and being part of a team.
• Strong working knowledge of Product Lifecycle Management, Master Data Management, and CRM Platforms.
• Excellent capability within Microsoft Office applications, experience with PowerBI and other analytics & visualization tools are a plus.
• Up to 20% travel required.

Benefits for this role include: Medical, vision, dental, discretionary bonus up to 30% (50% personal performance based & 50% company performance based), profit sharing (which feeds retirement) at a minimum of 3% annually and 216 hours PTO in the 1st 12 months.