Job Description

Have you ever enjoyed Arnold®, Brownberry® or Oroweat® bread? A Thomas’® English muffin or bagel? Or perhaps snacked on a Sara Lee®, Entenmann’s® or Marinela® cake or donut? If the answer is yes, then you know Bimbo Bakeries USA!

Bimbo Bakeries USA is part of Grupo Bimbo, the world’s largest baking company with operations in 33 countries. Bimbo Bakeries USA (BBU) employs 20,000 associates across the U.S. in bakeries, sales centers, corporate offices and on sales routes to ensure our consumers have the freshest products to feed their families at every meal. But our associates come to work for much more – the chance to feed their own lives through exciting work that offers the opportunity to make a real difference in their professional and personal lives every day.

The location of this role is flexible and can be remote with frequent travel to Horsham, PA

Innovation plays a key role to remain competitive in the market and to position ourselves for further growth. To focus our efforts, our Innovation team will work closely with our Brand Teams, R&D, Technical Services and Sales teams to support the goals and strategies of our branded businesses.

The Manager of Innovation position will support our Bread Innovation team and will play a key role in filling our future innovation pipeline.   The person in this position will be responsible for understanding our category business objectives, working through consumer insights to ideate new products and then shepherd those new ideas through a product development process.   This team member will lead their projects with cross functional teams through testing and  commercialization.   This individual will need to demonstrate consumer empathy, as well as excellent team work, communication skills, organization, and project management skills.  Exposure to a variety of market research techniques and experience in data analysis are also important.  We are looking for candidates who are passionate about food and food trends and who enjoy the work of creating new things.

This position reports to the Director of Innovation for Bread and Buns & Rolls.

Key Job Responsibilities:

• Mine trend and consumer data to map where the consumer is going and generate compelling product ideas that meet their needs. 

• Systematically evaluate ideas to select high potential opportunities for further testing and/or feasibility analysis

• Collaborate with internal research partner to design innovation testing (concept, prototype, in-store etc.) to best prove out innovation viability with consumers

• Develop strong, collaborative relationships with cross-functional teams (Brand Teams, Operations, Sales, R&D) to ensure collaboration and alignment of direction at all stages of development and launch.

• Use information, logic, and sound business judgment to develop new products and categories.

• Have project management skills to shepherd projects through to execution and experience with annual business planning.

• Prepare persuasive sales and internal communication materials.
• Work collaboratively with agency and research partners.

• Must be agile in creating and reading data analysis to generate business insights.

• Develop and manage new product and program handoffs (process and materials) to ensure a smooth transition of new product launch activities throughout the development process.