Recipe Development Jobs - What Are They and How to Get One

By ZipRecruiter Marketplace Research Team

The qualifications to get a recipe development job depend greatly on your career path. If you start in the restaurant or fine dining industry, you may get a book deal to write about your restaurant’s food or ingredients. This requires years of patience and success as a cook. Others study food science or nutrition in college or at a culinary institute. Other recipe developers may have no formal background in food or food science, but they combine their passion for cooking with their writing skills and develop recipes for their audience.

Careers in recipe development include working as a chef, a food scientist, or recipe consultant. Although your specific duties differ depending on where you work, you typically have the same responsibilities, which include coming up with new recipes, testing them, and publishing them, either on food blogs, in cookbooks, or other publications, such as magazines like Bon Appetit or Cooks Illustrated. If you are a recipe consultant, you may work with large food manufacturing companies or companies that operate industrial kitchens, such as hospitals or school cafeterias, or work for smaller restaurants and bakeries to help them design menus or meal plans.