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Senior Product Developer

Seamore might just be Europe’s hottest (or coolest) food startup, as we are turning seaweed into an everyday food. Why? Because it’s tasty, our planet’s original superfood and the most sustainable food available to man. By presenting seaweed as foods we already know and love – seaweed pasta, bacon, wraps and bread – we have managed to do what no one has done before: to get (normal) people to eat seaweed. Key in this? Product development. That’s where you come in.

The role : your mission
To make seaweed an everyday food, it needs to get close to food we already know and love. Seamore designs seaweed-based products, creates prototypes and outsources production to specialized producers. We source our own seaweed that is used in the process. The mission for product development can be divided in these challenges:

Concept – 

A product needs to solve somebody’s problem. Remove a pain or bring a gain. And it should simultaneously fit with Seamore’s mission. A winning concept solves the entire puzzle and is a great story at the same time. Product development needs to be a holistic exercise.

Cook

• Food is about the joy of eating. Flavors, ingredients, texture, smell, experience. Seaweed should bring more than nutritional benefits, it should help create great food. And although we strive to create products that are as close to nature as possible, technology still plays a crucial role in creating the food of the future. How do you create a plant-based tuna. Or build a tortilla wrap with seaweed that behaves like a normal wrap? As a small company, we don’t have the develop every solution but know where to find it and apply it.

Source

• Partners and external knowledge are everything. We can design anything, but eventually it will have to be produced. How are products currently made and where can we make a positive difference? Who will be a great partner and how do we work together? Which collaborations are possible and how do we find and source the right ingredients?

Manage – 

Creating winning products is a complicated process with numerous variables. Product development is necessarily also about managing that process, with all the players and constraints

Who you are
First, you should get excited when reading about the mission of product development at Seamore. Second, you should have gained significant and demonstrable experience – at a minimum of 3 years – in the following areas:

Designing new ‘needs-based’ products.

 You have had lead responsibility in creating innovative food products. You have designed several products that were brought to market in retail and/or food service channels. You cooked, experimented, created prototypes. You validated with the target audience the product was going to solve a problem successfully. You use a structured approach and are comfortable in adapting that methodology to the situation.

Prepped for production

. You have identified partners, suppliers for supply of ingredients, flavors, production and worked hands-on with these partners to test and bring the product to launch and finetune the product afterwards.

Problem solving

. You have solved hundreds of issues, challenges around food processing, pricing, sourcing ingredients, balancing nutrition with flavor, price with value, shelf-life, food safety, conflicting trends or requirements etc.

Created access to…

 Knowledge, technologies, ingredients, people. You have your personal knowledge and experience, but you have learned how to leverage these a hundred-fold by accessing the rest of the world. You understand the power of networking and have applied this abundantly.

Survived Startup/Scaleup environment

. You feel at home in a high-energy, fast-moving, international, informal and entrepreneurial working environment. You bring energy to a team, happy to cross ‘department’-boundaries and have the courage to do what has not been done before. A lack of resources didn’t stop you, it just stimulated you to be more creative. When you look at our Core Values they do not appear conceptual but rather like things you have been doing all your life: Get Unstuck, Drive Transformation, Eat Yourself Happy, Good to Great and Act Bravely.

A day at Seamore as Senior Product Developer

Monday

The week starts with an overview of running projects with your own small R&D team. This is the project management crunch time where you track progress, redefine priorities and coach the team. One project looks to be going of course: we are dependent on a partner who’s not sticking to the timelines and you create a few alternative scenarios for creating faster progress. Then you get on the phone to get the partner Unstuck.

Tuesday

Cooking time. With an intern, you create and test various samples of a plant-based tuna replacement. Apart from sensory parameters, it is key to address the cost/pricing question up front so that whatever we create is affordable. You are integrating costing data from Riccardo (Operations) and the consumer pricing from Sales to achieve this. Later, you attend an online seminar about the future of packaging and prepare for a meeting around sustainability with the rest of the team. Core challenge: how do we make sustainability if our products tangible for the market?

Wednesday

You lead a weekly meeting with Sales, Marketing and Product Dev. on the projects that are in prototype phase. How is the new seaweed smoothie prototype after a lot of tweaking over the last week performing against the wishlist from Marketing and Sales? Seamore wants to pitch the prototype to an international brand in two weeks and we need to work out the scalability of the raw ingredient supply.

Thursday

In the Weekly Team Meeting, Seamore reflects on how it moving towards its Quaterly goals and discusses collaboration within the team. You explain you need help on detailing nutrition and positive/negative ingredients for a range of noodle soups we are developing from Marketing. End of the day you skype-interview two possible R&D interns and join a few Linkedin groups focused on green proteins to see if you can find expert advice. After the Weekly there’s the Celebration drinks and you hear that our chips range has received an international innovation award. Two drinks maybe?

Friday

This day is reserved for strategy. You are designing a 3-year product development roadmap. Today you are looking at market trends, new products that are being launched and scanning product reviews: what are they saying about the unmet needs of various audiences and what could we do about them? After you have structured your thinking you discuss the findings with Angela (Sales) to see if they match with the stories she’s getting from retailers.

(Weekend)

Yeah, you’re off. But you’re still cooking of course! And how easy is it to slip in some seaweed and start dreaming about the next product. Work’s a hobby.

How to apply ?
To apply for this position, send an email to 
; don´t forget to attach your CV and cover letter.
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