R D Engineer Jobs in Chicago, IL

Company Overview
Hometown Food Company is a rapidly-growing company with a portfolio of iconic brands in the consumer packaged food industry. With a focus on delivering quality, value, and familiarity to consumers across North America, the company’s products span baking, breakfast, and dinners through both retail and foodservice channels. Brands include Pillsbury, Chef Boyardee, De Wafelbakkers, Hungry Jack, and Martha White, amongst others. Hometown Food Company is focused on driving sustainable growth through innovation, disciplined cost management, and strong customer partnerships.

Position Overview
Tthe Vice President of Research & Development will serve as a strategic growth partner, leading the enterprise-wide R&D organization for a $1.6 billion consumer packaged goods (CPG) company. Based at our corporate headquarters in Chicago, IL, this executive will drive the entire innovation, product formulation, and technical commercialization agenda across all four of our major manufacturing assets and a co-manufacturing network.

While maintaining technical excellence and category leadership in our established frozen breakfast and dry baking mix categories, the primary strategic mandate for this role is to develop, build, and scale an entirely new pipeline of retort-processed products. This executive will act as the principal architect for our expansion into complex, high-quality canned pasta meals. The ideal candidate will blend visionary innovation management with deep, specialized mastery of low-acid canned food (LACF) development, leveraging this background to build close synergies between R&D, brand marketing, and field operations.

The Mission: Retort Innovation & Pipeline Expansion: This leader will directly bridge scientific capabilities with commercial strategy. You will transform our canned portfolio by establishing a world-class innovation pipeline, solving complex thermal processing challenges, and successfully commercializing next-generation shelf-stable meals across our internal plant network and external partners.

Key Responsibilities

Commercial Pipeline Alignment & Leadership

• Commercial Synergy: Partner directly with the Commercial team to bridge the gap between consumer insights, culinary ideation, and technical food science execution to ensure maximum market impact.
• Unified Team Leadership: Lead, mentor, and structurally unify the entire decentralized R&D organization across all four primary manufacturing assets and the corporate culinary and science labs.
• Commercialization Governance: Oversee a disciplined innovation process to accelerate speed-to-market while strictly maintaining margin and cost-of-goods-sold (COGS) requirements.

2. Retort Pipeline Development & Commercialization

• Pipeline Architecture: Own the technical blueprint for the design, formulation, testing, and scaling of a brand-new pipeline of shelf-stable, retort-processed products (specifically canned pasta entries).
• Thermal Processing Food Science: Solve highly complex food science challenges specific to retort processing, including starch stability, structural integrity of pasta under extreme thermal stress, and sophisticated sauce emulsification.
• Operational Benchmarking: Establish operational best-practices for filling weights, headspace management, container seal integrity, and precise heat-penetration profiles.
• Process Authority Liaison: Serve as the primary technical point of contact with external Process Authorities to establish and validate new scheduled thermal processes.

3. Multi-Plant & Co-Manufacturer Management

• Technical Transfers: Direct technical transfer, trial coordination, and full-scale commercialization protocols across our internal network, requiring regular travel to manufacturing facilities in Toledo, OH; Milton, PA; and Little Rock, AR.
• Co-Manufacturer Optimization: Evaluate, qualify, and manage the technical R&D relationships with external co-manufacturers to seamlessly extend corporate production capabilities and handle flexible capacity requirements.
• Continuous Improvement: Drive product optimization, alternative ingredient sourcing, and technical cost-reduction (margin enhancement) initiatives across all categories without compromising taste or quality profile.

4. Technical Governance & Food Safety

• Regulatory Compliance: Ensure unconditional regulatory compliance across the product catalog with FDA, USDA, and global food safety initiatives (SQF/BRC).
• Rigorous Documentation: Implement bulletproof technical documentation protocols for formulations, product specs, operational processing logs, and shelf-life studies.

Professional Qualifications & Experience

• Education: Bachelor’s degree in Food Science, Food Engineering, Chemical Engineering, or a highly related technical discipline is required. An advanced degree (MS or Ph.D.) is strongly preferred.
• CPG Leadership: Minimum of 12–15 years of progressive R&D leadership experience in food manufacturing, with a substantial track record of operating in large-scale CPG environments ($500M+).
• Retort & Canning Mastery: Proven track record of successfully innovating, developing, and launching low-acid canned food pipelines using advanced retort technologies. Deep knowledge of thermal processing principles ( calculations, heat transfer mechanics) is non-negotiable.
• Multi-Category Plant Experience: Technical familiarity across diverse plant operations—specifically involving frozen dough/par-baked items and industrial dry blending—is highly valued.
• Travel Flexibility: Ability and willingness to travel regularly to plant operations in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Arkansas, and various co-manufacturer locations to lead critical trials and scale-ups.

Leadership & Strategic Capabilities

• Commercial Mindset: An R&D leader who views innovation through a commercial lens—highly attuned to product margins, market viability, operational throughput, and capital expenditure ROI.
• Cross-Functional Unifier: A dynamic communicator capable of aligning plant operations managers, third-party co-manufacturers, and executive commercial teams behind an aggressive innovation roadmap.