Summary
Schweid & Sons is seeking an Innovation Commercialization and Insights Manager to support insight-led innovation, disciplined commercialization, and growth across new products, line extensions, product improvements, packaging changes, and business continuity initiatives.
This role will lead innovation and commercialization projects from early exploration through launch. This individual will help build and manage the innovation pipeline, support 3-5 year growth strategy, develop learning plans, analyze market and consumer data, translate insights into action, and manage the Stage-Gate process for projects.
This role requires a strong balance of research, analytics, project management, brand thinking, and executional discipline. The ideal candidate can use consumer, customer, category, competitive, and business data to identify growth opportunities, shape product concepts, support decision-making, and bring new products to market with speed, structure, and accountability.
Job Functions / Responsibilities
Innovation Strategy, Insights & Learning Agenda
- Support the development of innovation strategies, product pipelines, and growth platforms across Retail, Foodservice, and National Account channels.
- Build and manage learning agendas for key product lines, innovation platforms, customer opportunities, and commercialization projects, ensuring decisions are grounded in consumer, customer, category, and market understanding.
- Translate business questions into clear research objectives, hypotheses, learning priorities, research plans, consumer questions, and decision-ready outputs.
- Use market dynamics, consumer trends, syndicated data, customer insights, competitive intelligence, and internal business performance to identify opportunities for new products, line extensions, packaging improvements, and product optimization.
Marketing Research, Analytics & Insight Development
- Lead or support marketing research initiatives, including A&U studies, consumer surveys, concept screens, competitive reviews, packaging evaluation, claims research, and post-launch learning.
- Develop, review, and refine research questionnaires, screeners, discussion guides, concept stimuli, product evaluation forms, claims tests, and customer interview guides.
- Manage outside research vendors for quantitative and qualitative research, including research briefs, methodology alignment, timelines, fieldwork coordination, analysis, reporting, and final recommendations.
- Use Circana, customer POS data, syndicated data, shopper data, or similar platforms to support market understanding, category analytics, and innovation decisions.
- Develop clear, actionable insights and recommendations that support innovation strategy, product positioning, packaging, claims, sales materials, customer sell-in, and launch decisions.
Commercialization & Stage-Gate Leadership
- Lead the Stage-Gate process, ensuring projects are ready for gate moves, scope updates, decision points, and leadership reviews.
- Partner with stakeholders and business leaders to build monthly agendas, prepare decision materials, resolve open issues, and drive timely decisions.
- Reinforce Stage-Gate discipline by clarifying objectives, success criteria, owners, timelines, risks, and next steps.
- Improve the Commercialization and Stage-Gate process to increase speed, clarity, accountability, and cross-functional execution.
Project Management & Cross-Functional Execution
- Build project plans and timelines with cross-functional teams, including milestones, critical paths, dependencies, resources, risks, and decisions.
- Manage project follow-up from development through completion, tracking actions, owners, issues, timeline shifts, risks, and constraints.
- Coordinate work across Innovation, Sales, R&D, Operations, Quality, Food Safety, Packaging, Procurement, Finance, and external partners.
- Facilitate project meetings, commercialization reviews, plant trial debriefs, packaging reviews, launch readiness discussions, and leadership updates.
Business Analysis, Forecasting & Performance Tracking
- Lead analytics and forecasting for innovation initiatives, including identifying risks and opportunities, supporting gap-closure plans, and managing the innovation budget.
- Develop presentations, reports, dashboards, and summaries that communicate project status, business impact, consumer insights, and recommendations.
Qualifications / Experience
Required
- BS/BA in Marketing, Business Administration, Food Marketing, Consumer Insights, Analytics, Communications, Engineering, Food Science, or a related field.
- Minimum of 5-10 years of experience in food marketing, brand management, innovation, commercialization, product marketing, consumer insights, category management, project management, or related CPG experience.
- Experience supporting or leading new product development, product launches, line extensions, packaging changes, product improvements, or commercialization projects.
- Experience working with Circana, NielsenIQ, SPINS, Numerator, customer POS data, syndicated data, shopper data, or similar category and consumer analytics platforms.
- Experience managing outside research vendors for both quantitative and qualitative research, including research briefs, methodology alignment, timelines, fieldwork, analysis, reporting, and final recommendations.
- Experience designing, managing, or analyzing quantitative research, including consumer surveys, concept testing, product testing, packaging research, claims testing, purchase intent, or usage and attitude studies.
- Experience supporting or managing qualitative research, including focus groups, in-depth interviews, shop-alongs, online communities, consumer panels, customer interviews, or exploratory research.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including storytelling, presentation development, and senior leadership communication.
- Detail-oriented with strong organizational skills and the ability to create structure, clarify ownership, track decisions, and drive follow-up.
- Proficient in Microsoft Office, including Excel, Outlook, Word, and PowerPoint.
- PMP or NPDMP certification is a plus but not required
What We Offer
- The expected compensation for this role is $90,000 - $125,000 per year, depending on experience and qualifications. Final compensation will be discussed during the interview process.
- Time Off: PTO, Safe & Sick Time, and Paid Holidays.
- Health Benefits: Medical, vision, dental, HRA, and voluntary disability benefits.
- Financial Benefits: 401(k) with employer match and life insurance.
- Location: This is an on-site role located in East Rutherford, NJ.
- Environment: Office environment.
