Research and Development Associate

About the Company

Your Snack Foods is a rapidly growing, SQF-certified contract manufacturer focused on healthier snack products. The company produces extruded snacks, protein puffs, chips, veggie snacks, and private-label items.

Role Overview

This position is for an R&D Associate to help drive new product creation, refine manufacturing processes, support customer commercialization, and contribute to ongoing improvement efforts. The role suits someone who enjoys practical food development work and is comfortable in a busy production setting.

What You’ll Do

You will support product launches from early concept through full-scale production, assist with pilot and commercial trials, help troubleshoot manufacturing runs, and maintain the technical documentation needed for smooth operations. You will also work with internal teams and customers to support samples, demos, and project commercialization.

Product Development

• Help create new snack concepts and move them toward commercialization.
• Develop and refine formulas for extruded snacks, protein puffs, chips, and other better-for-you products.
• Test ingredients and evaluate how they perform in formulations.
• Translate lab-scale formulas into pilot and commercial production batches.
• Assist with customer-specific product customization work.

Process Development

• Support pilot plant and commercial-scale production trials.
• Tune extrusion settings such as moisture, screw speed, barrel temperature, feed rate, and die setup.
• Capture process data and identify opportunities to improve performance.
• Help resolve issues that arise during manufacturing trials.

Documentation

• Keep formulation records organized and up to date.
• Draft batch sheets and production instructions.
• Revise product specifications as needed.
• Maintain ingredient and raw material databases.
• Record trial findings and improvement recommendations.

Customer Support

• Prepare product samples for customer review.
• Take part in customer demonstrations and presentations.
• Support the commercialization of customer-driven projects.
• Provide Sales with technical product details when required.

Quality and Food Safety

• Ensure formulations align with SQF standards, FDA rules, and customer requirements.
• Contribute to shelf-life testing activities.
• Carry out sensory assessments.
• Join root-cause investigations for product quality concerns.

Innovation

• Explore new ingredients and technologies relevant to snack development.
• Track market developments in better-for-you snacks.
• Assess competing products.
• Identify and propose new product opportunities.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Partner with Operations, Quality Assurance, Procurement, Sales, and Marketing.
• Help support production start-ups and line validation activities.

Qualifications

The preferred background includes a bachelor’s degree in Food Science, Food Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Nutrition, or a related discipline. A master’s degree is desirable but not mandatory. Candidates should have 0–3 years of experience in food product development or manufacturing. Internship or co-op exposure in snacks, bakery, cereal, or food manufacturing is an advantage, and experience with extrusion is a plus.

Skills and Knowledge

Useful technical knowledge includes formulation, ingredient functionality, basic food chemistry, product development methods, data handling, and basic statistical analysis. Familiarity with twin-screw extrusion, direct expansion snack production, protein snacks, gluten-free items, plant-based ingredients, clean-label development, shelf-life testing, and nutritional labeling is preferred. Strong analytical ability, clear communication, organization, creativity, multitasking, teamwork, and independent working are important.

Work Environment

This is an onsite role based in Berlin, New Jersey, within the New York City Metropolitan Area, and is part of the Research & Development department reporting to the Chief Innovation Officer or Head of R&D.