Senior R&D Lead, Icing & Sweet Goods Innovation

FGF Brands; Toronto; On-site; CAD 110,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health benefits

RRSP matching

Tuition reimbursement

Bonus program

Job summary

FGF Brands in Canada is seeking a Manager, Research & Development who will lead product development and innovation across sweet goods with a focus on icings for cakes and donuts. You will oversee development, scale-up, and commercialization to meet customer expectations, manufacturing capabilities, quality standards, and business goals.

The ideal candidate has strong bakery technical expertise, proven project leadership, and hands-on experience with cakes, donuts, icings, glazes, fillings, and

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Food Science, Food Technology, or related field, or Culinary Diploma/Certificate.
• Minimum 7 years in bakery product development, pastry, or food manufacturing.
• Experience leading R&D projects and mentoring technical teams.
• Hands-on experience developing cakes, yeast donuts, and cake donuts.
• Knowledge of icings, glazes, fillings, frostings, and finishing systems.

Responsibilities

• Lead development and commercialization of icings, glazes, fillings, frostings for cakes and donuts.
• Manage NPD projects from concept through scale-up and commercialization.
• Develop project plans with timelines, technical requirements, testing protocols.
• Evaluate ingredients for icing performance: texture, viscosity, stability, flavour.
• Identify opportunities to improve products via formulation and process improvements.
• Provide technical leadership during benchtop, plant trials, and first production runs.
• Ensure product specs, costs, ingredients, processing parameters and packaging.
• Collaborate with Operations, QA, Regulatory, Procurement, Marketing, Sales and suppliers.

Skills

Bakery product development

Project leadership

Ingredient formulation

Quality & food safety

Cross-functional collaboration

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Food Science / Food Technology or Culinary Diploma in Baking and Pastry Arts

Tools

Microsoft Excel

Microsoft Office

Job description

FGF Brands in Canada is seeking a Manager, Research & Development who will lead product development and innovation across sweet goods with a focus on icings for cakes and donuts. You will oversee development, scale-up, and commercialization to meet customer expectations, manufacturing capabilities, quality standards, and business goals.

The ideal candidate has strong bakery technical expertise, proven project leadership, and hands-on experience with cakes, donuts, icings, glazes, fillings, and