Senior Flavor Chemist (f/m/d)

Do you want to make a delicious difference?

Planet A Foods is for those who want to build something extraordinary with tangible purpose.

We’re reinventing how the world makes food ingredients, such as chocolate, replacing scarce, unsustainable raw materials with scalable, clean, and delicious alternatives.
We are united by impact, driven by innovation, and energized by the mission of building a food system that serves both people and the planet. Working here means choosing meaningful challenges over easy wins. You’ll join an entrepreneurial, international team of scientists, engineers, operators, and industry experts who are deeply committed to creating real planetary impact.

As a Senior Flavor Chemist, you will define the flavor of a new, sustainable coffee ingredient, one that delivers true taste parity while rethinking how coffee is made. Working hands-on in the lab, you will own the product end-to-end, from raw material treatment to instant or concentrate. Your work will directly shape a near-market product and influence how people experience coffee in their daily lives at scale, with sustainability built in.

A Taste of What to Expect

• Create coffee-like flavor systems from non-coffee raw materials, using thermal, chemical, and novel processing approaches to achieve true taste parity
• Own flavor generation end-to-end, ensuring intensity, stability, and quality from raw material treatment through to concentrate or instant formats
• Define the technical roadmap and key development milestones, turning scientific insight into a near-market, scalable product
• Make the critical technical trade-offs, balancing flavor excellence with cost efficiency and industrial scalability
• Design and execute data-driven DoEs, using experimentation to guide flavor creation, process optimization, and decision-making
• Contribute to scale-up from lab to production, supporting product and process development, process transfer, and hands-on troubleshooting
• Continuously improve testing protocols, analytical methods, and lab equipment, raising the bar for accuracy, repeatability, and speed
• Generate patentable innovations, contributing directly to Planet A Foods’ IP portfolio and long-term competitive advantage
  

The Perfect Recipe of Skills & Experience

• 5+ years of hands-on Flavor or R&D experience, ideally in coffee or adjacent categories, with a clear track record of bringing products close to market
• Deep expertise in Maillard and flavor chemistry, and the ability to translate theory into real, reproducible flavor systems
• End-to-end R&D ownership, you’ve led projects from early experimentation through scale-up and execution.
• Strong lab builder mindset: you design, run, analyze, and iterate experiments with confidence and speed
• Highly collaborative and impact-driven, able to work seamlessly with product, process, quality, and regulatory teams
• Commercially minded scientist: you understand cost engineering, scalability, and regulatory constraints and design with them in mind
• Precise and structured in documentation, ensuring traceability, reproducibility, and scientific rigor
• You have experience with patents or a strong interest in creating protectable, category-shaping technology

A Sweet Package

• A key role in defining the growth from a startup to a multi-million-dollar business
• Collaborate with a passionate international team working at the edge of what's possible
• Work in one of the rare food startups that truly scales and operates a 24/7 4-shift production system
• A very competitive compensation and opportunity to grow
• Stuff that other startups do as well (lunches, snacks, drinks, gym, ...)
• PLUS: Chocolate. Every. Single. Day.