Senior Food Scientist – Recent Product Development

Findlay Food Coatings Asia Pacific (FFCAP)

Melbourne, VIC | Full-time

113 years. Five generations. Three countries. Six sites. One technical voice in Australia.

The Findlay Group has been commercially baking bread in Gisborne, New Zealand since 1913, and we are now in our 4th generation of family ownership with the 5th generation already in the business. The bakery is what we are known for at home, but it is only half the story: we also develop and manufacture food coatings with groundbreaking technologies – predusts, batters, breadcrumbs and blended seasonings – from one site in New Zealand, two sites in Australia and three in the USA, employing around 200 people worldwide.

For a food scientist, that is the interesting part. Real bench and pilot work, not a folder of specifications. Customers who want something developed, trialled and running on a production line. A global technical team in Auckland and the USA behind you, and the whole Asia-Pacific market in front of you. If you have outgrown a role where every brief looks like the last one, keep reading.

The role

You will join our Global Technical Team as the Senior NPD Scientist in Australia, based in Melbourne – primarily at Chifley Park, and at times at our blending facility in Truganina. You will own projects from concept through to commercial launch: formulating, validating, trialling on site with customers, and staying with the product until it runs on the line. You will also be a key technical face of the business in Australia, working with customers,



internal stakeholders and international colleagues to the highest technical, food safety and quality standards.

Where you will make your mark

- Own NPD projects end to end – concept, formulation, validation, launch – and hit the timelines you promise
- Do the hands-on work: bench formulation, pilot runs and the scale-up that decides whether an idea is real
- Stand beside customers during trials and launches and on site which occasionally requires domestic and possibly international travel
- Be the technical contact customers ring first, and the one they trust with the hard questions
- Keep Health & Safety, Quality and Food Safety programmes airtight without slowing development down
- Hold the line on data integrity across product development and recipe management systems
- Get suppliers and ingredients approved, samples out the door, and processes better than you found them
- Work with the Technical Manager and the wider technical team to build a culture people want to stay in
- Actively back the Findlay Group’s values and sustainability focus – they are not wall art here

You will thrive here if you bring





- A degree or higher in Food Science or a related discipline
- At least 3 years’ experience in New Product Development within food manufacturing
- Formulation experience with batters, crumbs or powders – a valuable advantage
- A solid command of food safety, quality systems and manufacturing compliance
- The knack for making technical information land with customers and non-technical colleagues
- A practical, can-do approach that holds up when a trial goes sideways
- Confident Microsoft 365 skills (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, SharePoint)
- Full Australian working rights (mandatory)

Why you will want this one

- Genuine ownership from concept to launch, not a fragment of someone else’s brief
- A family-owned business where the leaders, and the family, know you by name
- Global technical support from Auckland and the USA, without big-corporate bureaucracy
- Innovative products and international customers, with your work ending up in front of real consumers
- A serious commitment to Health & Safety and to staff wellbeing
- Competitive remuneration, and a company genuinely passionate about food, people and community

If you want your technical work to be visible rather than buried, this is the one.

Closing Date: 5.00pm Wednesday 14 October 2026

We review applications as they arrive and may appoint before the closing date, so please do not sit on it.

Apply now, or contact Sarah, People and Performance Manager, at [email protected] for a confidential conversation.

📌 Senior Food Scientist – New Product Development (Melbourne)
🏢 Findlay Food Coatings Asia Pacific
📍 Melbourne