VP of R&D
A 12-month deadline, 14 products to reformulate, and an R&D team that couldn't do it.
A specialty ingredients business in the Northeast supplied functional food ingredients - stabilisers, emulsifiers, and flavour systems - to a range of mid-market food manufacturers. Two of their largest retail-facing accounts, representing approximately 38% of revenue, issued a joint requirement: by the end of the following fiscal year, all supplied ingredients needed to meet their updated clean-label standards. Artificial preservatives, certain emulsifiers, and several synthetic flavour compounds were out.
The existing R&D director was a formulation specialist - excellent on the bench, weak on programme management and commercial translation. The team had no roadmap, no prioritised list of SKUs, and no experience working to a hard external deadline driven by a retail partner.
The clock was already running. By the time the brief reached us, they had 11 months left. The VP they hired needed to hit the ground running - no ramp period, no discovery phase. The brief was clear: someone who had already reformulated a product range under commercial pressure, not someone who'd done it in a controlled innovation environment.
Looking for commercial R&D experience - not just technical depth
The natural instinct in a search like this is to find the most technically qualified food scientist available. That's usually the wrong call. Technical depth is table stakes at VP level. What matters is whether the person can translate formulation decisions into commercial timelines, manage supplier relationships during reformulation, and hold a retailer relationship through a transition period.
We defined the ideal candidate around four criteria:
- Experience leading a clean-label or reformulation programme - not as a team member, but as the accountable leader
- Ingredient-level expertise relevant to functional food systems - particularly natural stabilisation and clean-label emulsification
- Commercial acumen - the ability to present reformulation trade-offs directly to retail buyers and own the technical conversation
- Programme management capability - this was an 11-month sprint across 14 products, not an open-ended innovation brief
We found the right candidate at a larger ingredient supplier - a senior R&D director who had led a 22-SKU reformulation programme for a major flavour house two years prior and was ready to step into a VP role with broader ownership. Offer accepted in week seven.
All 14 SKUs reformulated. Deadline met. Both accounts renewed and expanded.
The new VP's first week was spent building a prioritisation framework - ranking the 14 SKUs by commercial risk, reformulation complexity, and lead time for alternative ingredients. The highest-risk products went first. By month four, eight SKUs had approved reformulations and were in production trials.
All 14 SKUs were reformulated and re-submitted to both retail accounts ahead of the deadline. Both accounts renewed their agreements. One extended the relationship, adding three new ingredient categories not previously sourced from the client.
"Eleven months to reformulate fourteen products with a team that had never done it before. The person Scott found had done it before at twice the scale. That was the only reason we made the deadline."
Chief Executive · Specialty Ingredients Business · Northeast USA
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