Research & Development Chef

About the role

As an R&D Chef at Popchew, your primary focus will be on developing and iterating our flagship menu for the new Popchew restaurant: a smash burger, sauce, and french fries. You'll then build SOP's, training, policies, and processes that enable the concept to scale to thousands of restaurant partners across the country, and eventually the world. You’ll combine your passion for culinary arts and experience with restaurant operations, along with best practices for utilizing consumer feedback, to create an iconic product that is objectively loved and preferred over competitor options by consumers all over America.

What You’ll Do:

• Culinary R&D of the flagship Popchew menu: smashburger, french fries, sauce. R&D should be performed across multiple vectors that affect consumer experience, including packaging, scalability of ingredients used (supply chain), prep methods and equipment (consistency and ease of operations), appearance, taste, and delivery optimization.
• Creation of a culinary R&D roadmap that prioritizes and plans the highest impact areas for iteration and testing of the product.
• Lead consumer and team feedback sessions by scheduling and sourcing participants, creating scorecards, conducting double-blind taste testing, synthesizing and analyzing results to measure product-market-fit for the menu and inform decisions and future iterations. Similarly, synthesize consumer reviews to making improvements to the product and operations.
• Develop SOP’s for kitchen operations that make it simple for line cooks to prepare our food consistently without error, 365 days a year.
• Complete quality control for any live Popchew locations, including secret shopping and providing feedback to SMB kitchen staff.
• As is helpful for R&D and developing actionable insights and improvements, work in the Popchew test kitchen preparing products for customers.
• Provide both in-person and ad hoc training and management of line cooks who operate out of partner kitchens, beginning with one location.
• The role may involve hiring, training, managing Popchew employed line cook(s)
• Document all R&D, consumer feedback, supply chain, packaging, and recipe formulations and processes for comprehensive knowledge hand-off and stakeholder review.
• Collaborate with Popchew’s Content Creator, as needed, to participate and potentially be featured in content for Popchew’s TikTok
• Ensure all new products comply with regulatory standards and company guidelines.

The Intangibles:

• Entrepreneurial mindset: Self-starter, and able to take ownership of ambiguous tasks. Every day we do things that have never been done before, and you will need to be comfortable with informed risk-taking.
• An owner personality: You're biased toward action, a great collaborator, and obsessed over details. You have strong organizational and project management skills and you never stop pushing towards clarity
• Grittiness: you never hesitate to roll up your sleeves and tackle something hands-on, you persevere when others might give up
• Strong verbal and written communication skills. Comfortable working with everybody from the CEO to the busboy
• You live, eat, and breathe restaurants.
• Comfortable wearing a lot of hats on any given week or day
• A passion for burgers - your whole life will be burgers for a little while so you better love em!

About Popchew

Popchew is building the defining food brand of the next century at the intersection of food and entertainment - starting with delivery.

Our plan is simple - build for where consumer behavior and food are going. In the United States, 51% of all food purchases now originate digitally, while food delivery has exploded into the fastest-growing mode of food consumption globally, fueled by next-gen consumers using delivery to eat, rather than cooking.

Where legacy food brands (Mcdonald's, Applebees, etc) won with real estate, in a digital age, Popchew is built to win online. Rather than investing in expensive real estate, we invest in consumer experience, content, and collaborations with iconic individuals and brands to capture attention. We scale nationally through an asset-light distribution model that allows us to reach customers without investing capital into real estate, food, or labor - instead partnering with vendors who already have the expertise and means to produce our products, creating a win-win opportunity.

In just two years, we've built Popchew from merely an idea into a category-defining, nationally operating brand that has collaborated with iconic brands and talent like Doritos and Trippie Redd, producing millions in revenue and feeding hundreds of thousands of customers nationwide.

The future of food will be built pixel by pixel, not brick by brick. Popchew is building it, and we’d love for you to join us!