Product Development Manager Jobs in Alabama (NOW HIRING)

Location:Brundidge, AL

Reports to: VP, R&D, Culinary, Innovation

Position Overview:

Trillium Foods is seeking a dynamic R&D Product Development Manager to lead and execute product development and commercialization projects that drive business growth and strengthen customer partnerships. This role serves as a critical link between R&D, Culinary, Operations, Quality, Procurement, Manufacturing, and Trillium Foods customers to ensure effective communication, responsiveness, and successful project execution.

The ideal candidate will lead the development of innovative food products across sweet and savory liquid categories—from benchtop formulation through commercial production—ensuring products meet customer expectations, manufacturing capabilities, food safety standards, quality requirements, and business objectives.

This role serves as a primary R&D contact for new customer onboarding, product development initiatives, and commercialization activities, supporting continued growth, innovation, and successful launches across the Trillium Foods portfolio.

This position is onsite at the Brundidge, AL facility Monday through Friday.

Key Responsibilities:

Product Development & Commercialization

• Partner with U.S. and Canadian Culinary and Product Development teams to support commercialization of new and existing products across sweet and savory categories.
• Serve as the primary R&D contact for customer commercialization projects, ensuring clear communication and seamless execution.
• Develop and optimize product formulations to meet customer specifications, manufacturing capabilities, quality expectations, and food safety requirements.
• Lead both minor and major product development projects from concept through commercialization for internal and external stakeholders.
• Work closely with Procurement and Product Development to identify cost-saving opportunities through reformulation or alternate ingredients while supporting bench, pilot, validation, qualification, and production trials.
• Engage with Production during plant trials to ensure successful commercialization, sharing learnings and results with R&D and Operations to foster continuous improvement.
• Demonstrate the ability to successfully take products from formulation through pilot trials, manufacturing scale-up, and commercial production while balancing customer expectations, quality, manufacturability, and cost objectives.
• Support the development and maintenance of ingredient statements, allergen declarations, product specifications, and labeling documentation to ensure regulatory compliance and customer alignment.
• Partner with Sensory, Culinary, and Quality teams to incorporate sensory feedback into product development while ensuring products meet quality, shelf-life, and customer expectations.

Project Management

• Lead and coordinate development timelines, sample requests, product evaluations, documentation, and approvals for first production runs.
• Prepare commercialization documentation and manage project follow-up to ensure projects meet customer expectations and business objectives.
• Drive cross-functional collaboration by participating in and leading meetings while advancing key initiatives.
• Develop and communicate clear commercialization plans to support successful launches of new and optimized products.
• Partner closely with internal teams to align timelines, manage dependencies, and ensure efficient execution.
• Uphold all site quality, food safety, and employee safety standards.
• Collaborate with the R&D Product Commercialization team to strengthen organizational capabilities and share best practices.

Customer Support

• Support customer-facing activities including:
• Product presentations
• Product evaluations
• Customer product reviews
• Supplier technical meetings
• Restaurant visits
• Plant trials
• Technical problem-solving sessions
• Maintain accurate and up-to-date product specifications, formulations, ingredient statements, allergen declarations, and commercialization documentation within both internal and customer databases to ensure compliance and alignment across all systems.

Required Skills & Abilities

• Strong food formulation and product development experience within a food manufacturing environment.
• Experience developing and commercializing sweet and savory liquid food products preferred.
• Strong understanding of ingredient functionality, emulsions, hydrocolloids, flavor systems, and food processing technologies.
• Demonstrated success leading products from formulation through commercialization and manufacturing scale-up.
• Ability to balance innovation, manufacturability, customer expectations, quality requirements, and cost objectives.
• Strong project management, communication, organizational, and problem-solving skills.
• Collaborative, self-motivated, adaptable, and comfortable working in a fast-paced, cross-functional manufacturing environment.
• Positive, inclusive mindset with a passion for continuous improvement and developing innovative food products.
• Strong understanding of food regulations, ingredient statements, allergen labeling requirements, and laboratory or pilot-scale processing equipment.

Qualifications & Experience

• Bachelor's degree in Food Science or another relevant scientific discipline.
• Minimum of 10 years of progressive food industry experience in product development, formulation, ingredient functionality, commercialization, scale-up, and manufacturing support.
• Experience supporting customer-driven product development and commercialization initiatives preferred.
• Experience working with sweet and savory liquid food products is strongly preferred.
• Ability to travel up to 20%.

Physical Requirements

• While performing the duties of this job, the employee is regularly required to stand.
• The employee must regularly lift and/or move up to 10 pounds, frequently lift and/or move up to 25 pounds, and occasionally lift and/or move up to 60 pounds.

Working Conditions

• While performing the duties and responsibilities of this position, the employee will regularly work with food ingredients containing common allergens.
• The employee is regularly exposed to wet and/or humid conditions and moving mechanical parts.
• The noise level in the work environment is typically moderate.

Trillium Foods provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any kind, in accordance with all applicable federal, state, and local laws.