Food Engineer – Harrisburg, PA or Winchester, VA (This role requires splitting time between Harrisburg, PA and Winchester, VA)

The Food Engineer role is a unique opportunity managing new product development work overseeing pilot plant operations, discovering and implementing cost savings opportunities and creating continuous improvement initiatives for Riviana Foods. This role works closely across several functional groups in our business (product development, operations, marketing, supply chain) to ensure the company is well represented in innovation and value added contributions (cost & improvements). The person hired to fill this role must be self-driven, highly engaging and work comfortably across a wide spectrum (production plant personnel to senior executives) and able to work in locations which are two hours apart for periods of extended duration.

This role serves as the technical expert encompassing product renovations, quality improvements, customer requests, cost savings initiatives, technology development and optimization of manufacturing networks. As a Food Engineer, the person filling this role must be able to vision the engineering processes while applying a food science/human nutrition skills to effectively provide the technical leadership needed to support multi-faceted projects.

Major Duties & Responsibilities:

• Become the expert in pasta drying; assist plants in optimizing product drier curves at all plants for quality and cost improvements
• Lead commercialization of new products at all plants
• Lead projects to improve quality and improve outputs for all pasta items
• Product and Process cost savings
• Pilot plant operation, maintenance and upgrades and provide technical support to manufacturing plants as needed
• Pilot Plant and production pasta die development
• Design and conduct test work and conduct plant trials at pasta pilot plant
• Conduct production scale-up and troubleshooting at startup of new products
• Develop finished product and ingredient specifications
• Keep abreast of new technical advances and product launches within target application segments and initiate product evaluations and proactive product development
• Prototype development
• Ingredient and Product Specification
• Quality monitoring post launch
• Product and Process cost savings
• Co-packer qualifications for white pasta & noodles

Key Attributes for Success

• Manage pilot plant work and commercialization of new products - ~50% of the workload
• Conducting all cost saving projects/initiatives to deliver $500k - $1M annual savings - ~35% of the workload
• Continuous Improvement projects, which may include dryer curve optimization, extrusion die optimization and quality improvements - ~15% of the workload

Job Skill Requirements:

• Strong oral and written communication skill
• Excellent organizational and project management skill
• Solid expertise in food formulations and understanding of food systems
• Possess strong engineering understanding of food manufacturing processes and finished products
• Excellent working knowledge of flour and pasta
• Passion for food and innovation
• Solid knowledge and understanding of food engineering, food ingredients, food chemistry, food processing, and food functionality
• Travel requirements 50% with the majority of travel split between the Winchester, VA Pilot Plant and Harrisburg, PA product development facility.

Education:

• BS degree in Food Science, Food Engineering, Cereal Science or related field required
• Proficient with Excel and MS Project software
• Must be able to lift 50 lbs.

Experience:

• 5 -7 years of product development experience on cross-functional project teams managing products from conception to commercialization