Development Chef

Simmer; Slough; On-site; GBP 45,000 - 60,000; Full time

Job summary

Simmer, based in West London, is hiring a Development Chef to take new meals from idea through scaled production and launch. You’ll cook, test ingredients, taste and adjust to ensure dishes are ready to launch, balancing flavour, nutrition, cost and manufacturability.

You will lead development across multiple dishes, collaborating with Product Lead and manufacturers to refine recipes and scale output while maintaining high quality and consistency.

Qualifications

• Strong chef with excellent flavour instincts.
• Hands-on recipe development experience.
• Ability to take a dish from idea to repeatable, launch-ready.
• Balance flavour with nutrition, cost and operational reality.
• Capable of scaling recipes and working to deadlines.
• Curious, collaborative and low ego.
• Experience with scaled food manufacturing is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Develop and test recipes in our development kitchen.
• Turn food ideas into dishes that work for Simmer and our customers.
• Iterate quickly through tastings, feedback and trials.
• Build nutrition and protein requirements into the development process.
• Understand ingredient and recipe costs and make sensible commercial decisions.
• Work with suppliers and manufacturing partners to understand constraints.
• Take recipes through factory trials and scaled production.
• Diagnose changes in flavour, texture, appearance or quality when recipes are scaled.
• Adapt recipes and processes to solve problems without compromising the dish.
• Improve existing meals as well as developing new ones.
• Keep up with ingredients, cuisines and trends that could improve Simmer's food.

Skills

Strong chef

Recipe development

Scale-up

Nutrition balance

Cost awareness

Collaboration

Job description

Development Chef

West London - Full-time

£45,000 - £60,000

About us

Simmer started with £10 of ingredients, a handful of family recipes and two brothers who wanted to make healthy eating easier.

What began in a small kitchen has grown into one of the UK’s fastest-growing food businesses. Today, we make chef-prepared, high-protein meals for thousands of customers every week and have ranked 5th in the Sunday Times 100 for two years running, in 2025 and 2026.

But we're still building.

We're founder-led, independent and ambitious about where Simmer can go next. Our mission is simple: make eating well effortless, without making food boring.

That means creating meals people genuinely look forward to eating - proper food, inspired by dishes and flavours from around the world, while delivering the nutrition our customers rely on us for.

As we grow, developing brilliant food and making sure that quality survives at scale becomes increasingly important.

That's where this role comes in.

The Role

We're looking for a Development Chef to develop new Simmer meals from concept through to scaled production and launch.

You'll spend a lot of time in the kitchen: developing recipes, testing ingredients, tasting, adjusting, solving problems and getting dishes to the point where they're genuinely ready to launch.

The challenge is that a great Simmer meal has to do several things at once.

It has to taste brilliant. It has to deliver nutritionally. It has to work commercially. And it has to be possible to produce consistently at scale.

You'll need to think about all four.

Creating something brilliant in a development kitchen is one thing. Making sure it's still brilliant when we're producing thousands of portions is another.

So your involvement won't stop when the recipe leaves the kitchen.

You'll work closely with our Product Lead and manufacturing partners through trials and scale-up, comparing what comes out of production with what you originally developed and working out what needs to change when it isn't quite right.

Sometimes that's an ingredient.

Sometimes it's a process.

Sometimes the recipe that worked perfectly at small scale needs rethinking entirely.

We want someone who enjoys solving that problem.

What you’ll be doing

You'll own the development of new dishes from early concept through to launch, including:

• Developing and testing recipes in our development kitchen.
• Turning food ideas into dishes that work for Simmer and our customers.
• Iterating quickly through tastings, feedback and trials.
• Building nutrition and protein requirements into the development process.
• Understanding ingredient and recipe costs and making sensible commercial decisions.
• Working with suppliers and manufacturing partners to understand ingredient and production constraints.
• Taking recipes through factory trials and scaled production.
• Diagnosing changes in flavour, texture, appearance or quality when recipes are scaled.
• Adapting recipes and processes to solve those problems without unnecessarily compromising the dish.
• Improving existing meals as well as developing new ones.
• Keeping up with ingredients, cuisines, restaurants and food trends that could make Simmer's food better.

You'll work across multiple dishes and stages of development at once, so you'll need to be organised, decisive and comfortable moving at pace.

Who we're looking for

Your exact background is less important than whether you can develop really good food.

You might already be a Development Chef or NPD Chef within prepared meals, meal kits, food-to-go or food manufacturing.

Or you might have come through professional kitchens before moving into food development.

We're looking for someone who:

• Is first and foremost a strong chef with excellent flavour instincts.
• Has hands-on recipe development experience.
• Understands how to take a dish from an idea to something repeatable and ready to launch.
• Can balance flavour with nutrition, cost and operational reality.
• Understands the challenges of scaling recipes or has the technical curiosity to become exceptional at it.
• Can diagnose why something isn't working rather than endlessly tweaking without understanding the cause.
• Is comfortable developing several products at once and working to deadlines.
• Takes ownership of a dish beyond simply producing the first recipe.
• Has high standards but is pragmatic about how to achieve them.
• Is curious, collaborative and low ego.

Experience working with scaled food manufacturing would be a real advantage, but we're open to different routes into the role.

What we care about is food judgement, development ability and the drive to keep improving something until it works.