Associate Director of Culinary Innovation

At HelloFresh, we want to change the way people eat forever by offering our customers high-quality food and recipes for different meal occasions. Over the past 10 years, we've seen this mission spread around the world and beyond our wildest dreams. Now, we are a global food solutions group and the world's leading meal kit company, active in 18 countries across 3 continents. So, how did we do it? Our weekly boxes full of exciting recipes and fresh ingredients have blossomed into a community of customers looking for delicious, healthy, and sustainable options. The HelloFresh Group now includes our core brand, HelloFresh, as well as: Green Chef, EveryPlate, Chefs Plate, Factor_, and Youfoodz.
- We are looking for a creative, innovative and food-obsessed Associate Director of Culinary Innovation to lead our Culinary Innovation team. Reporting to the Senior Director of Product Development, this role will be responsible for shaping our product development strategy and translating our annual product roadmap into a physical product to delight and excite our customers.

You will be a customer-centric leader that will build our Culinary Innovation strategy to develop a robust innovation pipeline to address consumer needs and deliver future growth opportunities, while continuously enhancing our existing product.

This person will develop a deep understanding of our target customer and cultivate and energise the Product Strategy and Product Development teams to create innovative food solutions to fit customer needs. You will keep us ahead of food trends and our competitors to maintain HelloFresh as the leading brand in the meal-kit space.

You will
- Translate our product strategy into a physical product across all brands, managing the ideation of each concept (product guardrails, recipe guardrails and ingredients), utilising best practices from HelloFresh International markets, our competitors and global trend data
- Build a product design stage-gate framework that improves our creative thinking and design output capabilities, developing great new products and improving existing products as we gain feedback back from our customers
- Partner with the Associate Director of Product Strategy to identify gaps with current product offering and help to ideate solutions to fill customer needs
- Partner with our Procurement teams to manage our portfolio of ingredients, onboarding new and exciting SKUs for our customers and consolidating them where it makes sense
- Partner with Product Marketing on product positioning, naming, photography and go-to-market support plan for new product launches
- Partner with Editorial on style guides and execution of physical and digital recipe card UX for new products
- Become an expert in our customers’ taste and dietary preferences
- Stay current on all food-related market and competitor trends through research and benchmarking

You have / are...
- Tertiary qualifications in Culinary, Product Development, Product Design or Food Science
- 8-10 years of experience working in food industry in product design, development and implementation
- Passionate about the world of product/ ingredient design and innovation. You bring a valuable perspective from your vast experience.
- Able to influence, gather input and drive alignment among a diverse set of stakeholders. You are able to lead without authority and motivate others to deliver on longer term projects as well as day to day operations
- Are collaborative with a desire to work cross functionally with various teams to gather key inputs
- Excited to work in a fast-paced environment with constant change.
- Have strong up and downward management skills with clear communication
- Have a “roll up sleeves” attitude to entering workstreams and getting them over the line
- Proactive, ambitious, and assertive: you take ownership of your work
- Entrepreneurial and can make things happen
- Experience using HelloFresh or EveryPlate is a plus

What you’ll get in return
- The chance to have a significant impact on one of the fastest-growing global food technology companies in an exciting growth phase
- Egoless environment, constant learning with room for personal growth
- Flexible working arrangements
- Company discount - 70% off HelloFresh boxes
- Free access to Headspace
- HelloFresh Academies - monthly internal learning & development
- A diverse and vibrant international environment, with offices in 18 countries

Start Date: Immediately available - flexibility to accommodate notice periods

Duration: Permanent full time role.

Location: Chippendale Head Office

**Salary**: Competitive salary & employee benefits

LI-Hybrid
- About HelloFresh
- We believe that sharing a meal brings people of all identities, backgrounds, and cultures together. We are committed to celebrating all dimensions of diversity in the workplace equally and ensuring that everyone feels a sense of inclusion and belonging. We also aim to extend this commitment to the partners we w