Business Development Manager, Functional Ingredients at Plantible in Austin, TX; Vista, CA

Job description

• 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.

Responsibilities

• 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.

Requirements

• 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.
• 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.

Skills

Required

• Sales and business development
• Negotiation
• Strategic thinking and innovation

Preferred

• Hands-on product development
• Customer qualification experience
• Startup experience
• Relationships with major accounts

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