Business Development Manager, Functional Ingredients

Plantible Foods

$130K — $140K *
Food & Beverages
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5+ years in functional ingredients sales within confectionery, bakery, or condiments.
  • Experience in closing sales deals with verified results.
  • Technical understanding of proteins, hydrocolloids, emulsifiers, enzymes, or starches.
  • Capable of operating independently without established infrastructure.
  • Technical degree in food science, chemical engineering, or related field.

Responsibilities

  • Own and manage a designated account list, from prospecting to closing sales.
  • Report weekly sales performance against your targets.
  • Negotiate pricing, volume commitments, and development agreements with clients.
  • Map customer processes and ingredient costs to provide tailored solutions.
  • Direct application trials and evaluate hypothesis results for customers.
  • Quantify customer benefits related to product enhancements and cost efficiencies.
  • Innovate and remove outdated conventions in ingredient qualification.

Benefits

  • Comprehensive health and wellness benefits.
  • Medical, dental, and vision insurance included.
  • Discretionary unlimited paid time off.
  • Paid holidays observed throughout the year.
  • 401(k) retirement plan available.
  • Career stipend provided for professional development.
  • Opportunities for career growth and advancement.
  • Flexible and entrepreneurial working environment in a rapidly growing startup.
  • Team building events and activities that promote camaraderie.
  • Relocation financial support for smoother transitions.
  • Access to beautiful outdoor spaces for recreation.
Full Job Description
Kindly be advised that we are handling the recruitment for this position internally and are not partnering with external recruiters.

How you will contribute:

This is a standalone commercial role, not a technical support function. You will own a named account list and carry the number on it, reporting to the Head of Commercial Development. Our R&D team runs the bench; you decide what gets run, why it gets run, and what the results mean for the customer and the business.

What you will be working on:

Sell

  • Own a named account list. Prospect, qualify, close, reorder.
  • Carry a number and report against it weekly.
  • Negotiate pricing, volume commitments and development agreements.

Translate Value

  • Map the customer formulation, process constraints and current ingredient cost stack.
  • Specify and direct application trials. Internal and customer R&D execute; you set the hypothesis, read the result, and decide the next iteration.
  • Quantify customer benefit: cost-in-use, functional replacement ratio, label and claim impact, process and yield benefit.
  • Hold your own in a customer pilot plant. You do not need to run the trial. You need to know when the answer you are given is wrong.

Innovate to Drive Change

  • BD Innovation: Ingredient qualification is slow by convention, not by physics. Find the conventions that do not apply to us and remove them.
  • Product Innovation: Feed customer requirements back into product development and specification.

What you bring to Plantible:

  • Sold functional ingredients into confectionery, bakery or condiments, and personally closed the deals you claim.
  • 5+ years with functional ingredients. Proteins, hydrocolloids, emulsifiers, enzymes or starches. Command of gelation, aeration, emulsification, water binding and heat stability in real systems.
  • Carried a quota in an early-stage ingredient business and grown a book from early revenue toward scale. Zero to $50M is the shape, not the threshold.
  • Operated without infrastructure. No marketing team, no sales ops, no brand doing the work for you.
  • Technical degree in food science, chemical engineering or equivalent, or equivalent fluency built in a lab or plant.

Preferred

  • Hands-on product development: bench, pilot, sensory, shelf life, scale-up, spec, QA, regulatory. You know where a formulation breaks and why.
  • Replaced an incumbent functional ingredient in a live commercial application and held the spec through scale-up. Egg, dairy protein, hydrocolloid or emulsifier.
  • Took a novel ingredient through full customer qualification, including regulatory and supply-continuity objections.
  • Founder or early commercial hire at a startup selling a physical product to industrial buyers.
  • Standing relationships with R&D or procurement at major confectionery, bakery, condiment or CPG accounts.

Choose Plantible Foods

Joining Plantible means ontributing to a sustainable future for all. We are a venture backed startup that is both spreading happiness amongst our employees and to current and future generations. We believe diversity creates uniqueness. Our team is composed of highly talented people with different interests and hobbies, which makes for a rich working environment.

At Plantible we are continually working on our offerings to foster the best team. Check it out!

  • Competitive health and wellness benefits
  • Medical, Dental and Vision Insurance
  • Discretionary Unlimited PTO Program
  • Paid Holidays
  • 401k Program
  • Career Stipend
  • Career development and growth opportunities
  • Working in a rapidly growing, flexible and entrepreneurial environment
  • Team building and company-wide events
  • Financial support with your relocation, if necessary, ensuring a smooth transition
  • And of course, lots of beautiful land for outdoor activities!


The pay range for this role is:

130,000 - 140,000 USD per year (US)

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