Product Development Specialist

Full Job Description

Are you craving a career where your ideas can flourish, and your taste buds can rejoice? Come join a growing team and experience the ultimate perk: free cheese!

We have openings for a Product Development Specialist to join our team. The general goal of the Product Development Specialist is to effectively manage the sample facilitation and new item onboarding processes, ensuring smooth coordination and timely execution of tasks to support the development and introduction of new products in line with customer expectations and company standards.

Freshpack is a custom cheese packaging company that develops and innovates cheese products and packaging. Our products can be found in all 50 states and in most major retailers. Over the past 25 years, our team has grown from 15 to 230+ employees. It is an exciting time to join our team, as we are poised for substantial growth over the next 3-5 years.

Job Summary

The Product Development Specialist is responsible for managing the sample facilitation process, coordinating and facilitating the new item onboarding process, and interacting with customers and vendors to ensure expectations are met during the onboarding of new items.

Duties/Responsibilities

Sample Facilitation:

• Facilitate the sample process from entering requests for internal and external sample production and testing through the sample lifecycle including feedback.
• Enter sample request and communicate with appropriate stakeholders to establish sample production timeline.
• Establish the metrics on which the sample will be assessed.
• Maintain records of the sample production.
• Maintain notebook of feedback from samples.
• Inspect samples upon completion and ensure it meets the expectation.

New Item Onboarding:

• Coordinate and facilitate the new item onboarding process. Perform the interdisciplinary activities of coordinating new item set-up with operations, sales, Food Safety, Product Quality, Accounting, Maintenance and Shipping/Receiving.
• Act as primary facilitator in item set-up in our ERP system including:
• Establish new raw material and finished goods
• Creation and maintenance of bill of materials
• Creation of product routing
• Facilitate the New Item (NIA) workflow by organizing work tasks of the team and scheduling and administering NIA meetings
• Create Customer specifications for new items
• Create manufacturing instructions (internal specifications)
• Maintain product attribute database
• Maintain document libraries
• Monitor the execution of new items and measure against the plan

Customer and Vendor Interactions:

• Facilitate and participate in onboarding the new items with customers and vendors.
• Ensure the customer's expectations are being met from an item design and sampling standpoint.
• Complete customer forms relating to item onboarding.
• Facilitate and maintain supplier item related documents.

Compensation details: 55000-60000 Yearly Salary

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