Position: Product Development Manager Location: United Kingdom - Remote
This role leads the technical and people agenda for product formulation within a nutrition-focused manufacturing environment. You will be accountable for turning product concepts into scalable, compliant, and commercially viable nutritional premixes and sports nutrition products. Acting as a bridge between technical, commercial, and operational teams, you will ensure formulation excellence from early-stage design through to successful market launch.
In addition to managing and developing the formulation function, you will establish strong systems, embed best practices, and continuously improve how products are designed, validated, and delivered.
Key Areas of Responsibility Leadership, Strategy & Capability
You will set the direction for the formulation function, ensuring it supports wider business objectives such as innovation pipeline delivery, category expansion, margin performance, and customer satisfaction. This includes:
- Building, leading, and motivating multidisciplinary formulation and product development teams
- Developing future leaders through coaching, mentoring, and succession planning
- Managing departmental budgets, headcount planning, and capability investment
- Ensuring strong technical knowledge across premix blends and individual ingredients to support internal and customer-facing technical queries
Formulation & Product Design
You will have overall accountability for the technical quality and performance of formulations across nutritional premixes and sports nutrition products, including:
- Leading the development of vitamin and mineral blends, functional ingredient systems, and sports nutrition formats across powder, RTM, and RTD applications
- Ensuring formulations are grounded in scientific evidence, balancing efficacy, stability, bioavailability, sensory performance, and cost efficiency
- Overseeing pilot-scale trials, shelf-life studies, and formulation validation
- Approving specifications and ensuring formulation documentation meets internal and regulatory standards
- Monitoring ingredient innovation and regulatory change to ensure compliant and competitive formulations
- Supporting raw material changes, alternative sourcing strategies, and supplier approvals to manage risk and cost
Customer & Commercial Collaboration
This role works closely with customer-facing teams to ensure technical solutions align with commercial objectives and customer expectations:
- Translating customer briefs into robust technical and formulation requirements
- Contributing to technical proposals, cost modelling, and feasibility assessments
- Supporting customer launches through technical input, troubleshooting, and post-launch optimisation
- Promoting a structured "right-first-time" approach by ensuring clear scoping before development begins
- Providing technical guidance to commercial, quality, customer service, and production teams
- Acting as a key user and advocate for product data and formulation systems, driving improvements in efficiency and usability
Systems, Data & Continuous Improvement
You will strengthen how formulation work is governed, measured, and improved across the organisation by:
- Developing and maintaining clear SOPs, formulation standards, and technical documentation
- Implementing performance metrics and dashboards to track efficiency, effectiveness, and return on investment
- Driving continuous improvement initiatives to simplify processes and reduce complexity
Experience & Background
We're looking for someone who brings both technical depth and leadership capability:
- Degree-level qualification (BSc or MSc) in Food Science, Nutrition, Chemistry, Biochemistry, Pharmacology, or Chemical/Process Engineering
- Extensive experience within food, nutrition, or supplement manufacturing environments
- Proven people leadership experience, including cross-functional collaboration
- Hands-on expertise in nutritional premix formulation and sports nutrition products
- Strong understanding of powder processing technologies and formulation challenges
- Demonstrated ability to develop scientifically sound formulations with strong sensory performance