Senior Innovation Chef

• • Provide and own the culinary support to our brand innovation teams with the creation of gold standard recipe benchmarks. 

• • Ensure direct team are well supported and feel they belong, have influence and have a future at Yeo Valley, through effective 1-1s and acting upon Yeo voice feedback through inspirational and transformative leadership. 

• • Work with wider development teams to create inspiring moments of food for our customers and co-owners – Identify and allocate resource to support the brand planning process, co-owner experience business objectives and customer experiences.  

• • Support the Head of Product to embed a culture that recognizes the value in well-designed, delicious, versatile food. 

• • Ensure our concept design is guided by our food, farming and establishing culinary principles and leads the way on sustainably sourced ingredients. 

• • Ensure the products we design and optimize represent great value and are as affordable as possible whilst ensuring the best possible quality. 

• • Lead and facilitate our Innovation workshops and ensure they are held with agreed regularity to feed the brand planning process and build library of ideas that can be actioned at pace. 

• • Embed an insight-led approach to product development, keeping pace with fast changing consumer needs and going after the big opportunities. 

• • Work collaboratively across teams and with a network of peers within multiple directorates to ensure new products are positioned around what consumers truly need, delivering value for Yeo Valley. 

• • Support the team in understanding of the importance consumer experience. 

• • Collaborate with external and internal customers to respond to change with more speed and precision than our competitors. 

• • Be a pivotal link between Technical and Procurement, exposing teams to new ingredients and flavours to aid discovery within our supply base at the earliest timeframes. 

• • Be the go-to contact for our wider innovation teams to lead the the co-creation and refinement of physical concepts/prototypes with specific expertise in taste, flavour and quality to drive and maintain standards throughout the full NPD process. 

• • Ensure we maintain a wide assortment of products in incubation across multiple categories. 

• • Lead, inspire and evolve Yeo Food activities to enhance the co-owner and customer experiences.

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We’re independent, British and proud to be making the highest quality yogurts, desserts and ice cream under the Yeo Valley brand and for many of the UK’s major retailers. Operating from four dairies and two logistics centres in Somerset and Devon, we employ over 1700 staff and produce more than 25% of the UK’s packaged yogurt.

We’re sure you don’t need convincing, but there’s a whole host of benefits that we offer including:

• 25 days’ holiday, plus bank holidays 
• non-contributory pension scheme
• life cover
• healthcare cash back plan
• cycle to work scheme
• subsidised Yeo Valley products and services
• preferential rates with our partners
• annual bonus (as part of the Employee Benefit Trust, based on company performance for the year)
• learning and development opportunities; we’re committed to ensuring all of our employees have the chance to grow

Our closing dates are a guide for when the application window should close, although we may close the advert sooner if we can. So, we recommend you get your application in straight away – and don’t miss the opportunity to join us!

Unfortunately, we’re not able to provide employment sponsorship to candidates at this moment in time.

Please note that Yeo Valley do not accept speculative agency applications; we will only accept applications from preferred suppliers that have been submitted to us via our recruitment portal at the point of instruction.