Open for applications

Application Specialist – Dairy & Meat Alternatives

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About the vacancy

Sales
Account management
Expert Bachelor’s Degree (HBO, WO) Temporary to Permanent Full time Leiden, South Holland, Netherlands

About Your Next Job

We are seeking a highly skilled Application Specialist to drive the successful integration of Nourish ingredients into customer formulations across dairy, plant-based dairy, and meat applications.

This role is hands-on and bridges deep technical expertise with customer collaboration, ensuring formulas are technically designed, enabling our ingredients to deliver optimal performance, stability, and functionality under real-world manufacturing conditions. The role is at the interface between sensory and culinary capabilities, ensuring technical formulations meet the customers and consumers optimal experience.

The ideal candidate has a strong understanding of flavours, protein and fat interactions, emulsion and matrix stability, and end-product processing requirements. The role involves tasting prototypes and commercial food products, which may contain common allergens. This is an office and lab-based role in Leiden and includes periodic travel to customer laboratories and manufacturing sites.


About Your Tasks and Responsibilities

What you'll do

  • Develop, optimise, and scale dairy, plant-based dairy, hybrid, and meat formulations using Nourish ingredients in collaboration with customers.
  • Define inclusion rates, integration methods, and formulation strategies to achieve target functionality, including addition, replacement, or displacement of existing ingredients.
  • Plan and execute application trials, including experimental planning, testing, sensory evaluation, and reporting.
  • Troubleshoot formulation and processing challenges using analytical and creative problem-solving approaches.
  • Ensure prototypes and formulations meet end-product specifications, processing constraints, marketing requirements and customers compliance, such as certifications and labelling.
  • Develop and communicate ingredient use and protocols to customers, meeting their needs with customised solutions and application concepts that are easy to reproduce.
  • Provide hands-on support for ingredient integration, manufacturing scale-up, and quality control considerations.
  • Collaborate internally with sensory and culinary teams to ensure customer formulations are fully optimised, delivering an end-to-end customized solution that meets taste, texture, and performance expectations.
  • Present technical findings, recommendations, and innovations clearly to both internal teams and customers.
  • Maintain thorough documentation of formulations, trials, and technical learnings.Maintain comprehensive records of formulations, trials, protocols, datasheets, and ingredient performance.
  • Organise and update system logs, product databases, and formulation libraries to ensure knowledge accessibility.Share technical insights internally to support sales, marketing, and R&D teams in product development and positioning.

About Your Skills and Experience

What you'll bring

  • Bachelor's or master's degree in food technology, with Dairy and meat formulations, or related field.5 year minimum proven experience in dairy, plant-based dairy, or meat applications with demonstrable formulation and ingredient application expertise.
  • Strong understanding of flavours, fats, proteins, starches, emulsions, and functional interactions in complex food matrices.
  • Hands-on experience with industrial processing conditions, scaling formulations, and ensuring stability and performance in finished products.
  • Excellent problem-solving, communication, and project management skills.
  • Customer-facing experience with the ability to translate technical knowledge into actionable, commercial solutions.

About Your Benefits

What we offer

  • The opportunity to work at the cutting edge of precision fermentation, specialty fats and sustainable food and playing a pivotal role in revolutionizing the food industry.
  • A collaborative, fast-moving international team environment.
  • Competitive salary and benefits package.

Where Molecules Meet Opportunities

This role is ideal for you if

  • You take ownership of your work and thrive in a fast-moving environment.
  • You are adaptable and open to diverse responsibilities within a fast-paced, dynamic start-up environment, demonstrating curiosity and a proactive approach to learning and growth.
  • You are enthusiastic about making a meaningful impact in the food industry and are committed to maintaining high standards while tackling a variety of challenges.

Only apply if...

Send us your CV along with a brief cover letter telling us about why you’re the person for the job and why you want to work for Nourish Ingredients.


This is an exciting opportunity to be part of solving real-world problems and to add your mark to this new, delicious, and sustainable food system


Contact person

Rita Wittek

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Combining nature’s most potent fat molecules with cutting-edge science, we create the same fats that make dairy irresistibly creamy and meat delicious, without the animal.

As the global population grows, animal agriculture will not be efficient enough to meet demand. Both plant-based and traditional food companies face bottlenecks around authenticity and ingredient supply. That’s where we come in.

Nourish Ingredients is a deep tech company leading in animal-free fats and precision fermentation. We develop sustainable, high-performance ingredients for the future of food. By combining advanced biotechnology with deep food industry expertise, we partner with food and ingredient companies to create better-tasting, more sustainable products that help reshape global food systems.



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