Research Chef Jobs (NOW HIRING)

Reports to: Executive Director of R&D

Location: Onsite in Salt Lake City, Utah

Schedule: Monday–Friday, 9:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m.; flexibility may be required for production trials, travel, and urgent project needs

Compensation: Salaried; dependent on experience (DOE)

About REFRESH'D

REFRESH'D is a privately owned, internally funded startup specializing in freeze-dried foods for the general market. The company pairs startup energy with a proven track record: our founding team built one of Utah's most successful food brands and scaled it from national to international retail. Harvest Right, the Salt Lake City company that pioneered home freeze-drying in 2011, is a founding partner.

Position summary

This role provides culinary leadership and hands-on formulation support across the REFRESH'D portfolio. The Culinary Scientist / Research Chef creates strong product concepts and sensory targets, develops customer-ready prototypes, and works with food scientists to convert kitchen concepts into repeatable, cost-effective, commercially scalable products.

Key responsibilities

- Culinary development. Create culinary gold standards, recipes, prototypes, line extensions, serving applications, and customer-ready samples across broad areas such as dairy, fruit and vegetable products, prepared foods, and preserved or freeze-dried foods.

- Formulation. Develop and refine flavor systems, seasoning blends, ingredient combinations, inclusions, toppings, preparation methods, and rehydration instructions while meeting cost, nutrition, ingredient, and label objectives.

- Product direction. Translate customer needs, consumer insights, competitive products, and business objectives into clear product briefs, sensory targets, and practical development plans.

- Sensory leadership. Lead structured sensory evaluations and define appearance, aroma, flavor, texture, and preparation targets. Document comparisons, conclusions, and recommendations.

- Technical partnership. Work with food scientists to retain culinary intent through ingredient substitution, formula scaling, processing, freeze-drying, packaging, storage, rehydration, and commercial production.

- Samples and presentations. Prepare customer samples, product demonstrations, competitive cuttings, photography samples, preparation guidance, and application concepts.

- Documentation. Maintain accurate recipes, formulas, procedures, specifications, cost inputs, nutrition inputs, test notes, photographs, and revision history.

- Commercialization. Support pilot and production trials, evaluate commercial product, troubleshoot sensory and preparation issues, and recommend practical corrective actions.

- International manufacturing. Work with domestic and international co-manufacturers to communicate culinary targets, execute trials, approve sensory direction, and resolve issues. International travel is required.

- Cross-portfolio teamwork. Support the highest-priority R&D work across projects and partner with Operations, Quality, Regulatory, Procurement, Finance, Sales, Marketing, suppliers, and customers.

- Kitchen and laboratory ownership. Maintain safe, sanitary, organized work areas and manage assigned ingredients, samples, supplies, and equipment.

Qualifications

- Degree or formal training in Culinary Arts, Culinary Science, Food Science, or a related field. Equivalent combinations of relevant training and product-development experience may be considered.

- Culinary product-development, research-chef, applications, food-manufacturing, or commercialization experience. Three or more years is preferred.

- Demonstrated ability to create flavorful products within cost, ingredient, nutrition, process, food-safety, and manufacturing constraints.

- Strong sensory judgment and vocabulary, recipe documentation, scaling, kitchen organization, presentation, and customer communication skills.

- Comfort working with technical data, specifications, allergens, nutrition inputs, shelf-life requirements, and cross-functional technical teams.

- Ability to manage multiple projects, work hands-on, meet deadlines, and adapt quickly in a startup environment.

- Proficiency with spreadsheets, documents, presentations, databases, and recipe or formulation systems.

What success looks like

- Product concepts have a clear, compelling culinary target that can be reproduced at commercial scale.

- Customer and internal samples are accurate, attractive, well documented, and delivered on time.

- Culinary intent is maintained through technical development, freeze-drying, packaging, storage, and preparation.

- The role improves formulation speed and sensory quality across the full R&D portfolio.

Working and physical requirements

- Ability to work in office, kitchen, laboratory, warehouse, freezer, and food-production environments and follow required food-safety, sanitation, allergen, and PPE practices.

- Ability to sit, stand, and walk for extended periods and lift, carry, push, or pull items up to 30 pounds, with or without reasonable accommodation.

- Ability to work around common food allergens and a wide variety of food ingredients.

- Valid passport and ability to travel domestically and internationally based on project needs, including production trials and co-manufacturer support.

- Schedule flexibility for production trials, urgent sample deadlines, travel, and coordination across international time zones.

Equal employment opportunity

REFRESH'D Holdings, LLC is an equal opportunity employer. Employment decisions are based on qualifications, merit, and business needs. Qualified applicants will be considered without regard to any characteristic protected by applicable law. Reasonable accommodations are available for qualified applicants and employees with disabilities.