Trident Seafoods is the largest vertically integrated seafood harvesting and processing company in North America. Trident is a privately held, 100 percent USA-owned company with primary seafood processing operations and fleet support in twelve Alaska communities. Trident's global operations produce finished wild Alaska seafood products in 6 countries and its sales teams serve customers in over 50 countries. Trident employs approximately 9,000 people worldwide each year and partners with over 5,400 independent fishermen and crewmembers. Species harvested and processed by Trident include virtually every commercial species of salmon, whitefish, and crab harvested in the North Pacific and Alaska. The global supply chain also includes cultured and wild species from a network of trusted sources worldwide.
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Summary:
The Food Technologist develops new product formulations and provides improvements to existing products as project lead. This role is responsible for collaborating with project teams on prototype development through full commercialization and finalizing product attributes and specifications following successful commercialization.
Essential functions (responsibilities, tasks, supervisory needs)
Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform these essential functions.
- Initiates, produces and supplies existing or prototype product samples designed to meet target account needs. Drafts provisional specifications on prototype products prepared for target customer sampling.
- Performs bench top research and evaluation of new ingredients and product formulations in their area of responsibility; plans, performs and documents lab experiments, shelf-life testing, and production trials.
- Evaluates and recommends various ingredient/recipe components in terms of functionality, formula, acceptability to target customer/geographic region of account, cost verification and Trident manufacturing capability. Ensures new ingredient opportunities are properly vetted and approved prior to preparing customer samples.
- Prepares and ships out hand samples of new products for internal and external sampling/ evaluation. Ensures adequate supply of 1st production samples retains and bench control for cook validation, product cuttings, shelf-life tests etc.
- Responsible for assigned multiple R&D projects partnering with the supply chain, FSQA, production team, category and project management where required.
- Leads multiple projects with assistance from manager or senior developer.
- Tightly collaborates with fellow food scientists and chefs on product development, R&D processes, presentations, and everyday operations. Mentors less experienced team members.
- Contributes to New Product Development (NPD) creative exploration (10% of job scope).
- Designs methods to improve ingredient qualities and food production in areas of flavor, color, texture, nutritional value, convenience, and/or physical, chemical, and microbiological composition of foods, as well as cost improvement and process efficiency.
- Creates R&D specifications and documents all tests (lab and plant trials); compiles and records testing data and charts for ingredient performance, production test information/ summary and on-going projects.
- Participates in sensory evaluations, sets up and leads product cuttings/presentations to internal project teams, introducing or re-acquainting them to specific products, ingredient features, benefits, requirements, and application techniques.