Wine & Meat R&D Director

Innovation has always been the foundation of FOSS’ success. A global outlook and a mission for more sustainable use of the world’s food resources are key to more than 300 passionate employees in R&D, located in two innovation hubs.

We have a legacy of developing innovative solutions that set the standards within food analysis across the globe. We build our solutions on strong technological platforms and deep insights into our customers’ businesses and processes, and we value strong collaboration with customers throughout the development phase.

For FOSS’ R&D management team, we are seeking a new R&D Director for our Wine & Meat business unit. The unit is responsible for turnover, growth, profitability, and bringing new innovative analytical solutions to the market within Wine & Meat.

The Job

You will report to the SVP for R&D and be responsible for New Product Development (NPD) as well as all other R&D activities related to our Wine & Meat segments. NPD projects involve hardware and software development, automation, digital integration, and artificial intelligence, so a strong technical understanding is essential.

You will be based at FOSS’ Innovation Center in Hillerød, working closely with internal and external stakeholders, customers, partners, and FOSS’ Sales and Service organizations across the globe.
You will be involved in the entire NPD process—from early business identification and concept development through customer trials to market implementation—and will drive the project team through:

Understanding customer needs to ensure projects have clear requirements and product specifications
Supporting gate deliveries in an agile setup
Stakeholder management and communication to support project progress
Ensuring seamless product launch and market implementation

As R&D Program Director, you will work across the organization, bridging R&D, Sales & Marketing, and Service within the business unit. This means you must have a strong sense of stakeholder management, customer focus, and what benefits the overall FOSS business.

In addition to supporting new product development, your responsibilities include:

Supporting product quality of existing solutions
Adding new applications to existing solutions
Ensure the wellbeing, motivation, and performance of your team

Finally, as part of R&D management, you will actively contribute to strengthening the entire R&D organization—by mentoring leaders, sharing best practices across teams, aligning development processes, and helping to build the competencies and structures needed to accelerate innovation and execution throughout R&D.

Qualifications

We expect that you have:

3+ years of experience in project and people management in complex organizational settings
A strong technical or scientific background (e.g., Engineer, MSc, or equivalent)
Solid business acumen and excellent communication skills
Strong facilitation capabilities and a drive to nurture productive collaborations

Who are you?

You are curious, self-driven, and eager to understand our customers’ businesses to create impactful solutions. You thrive on solving complex problems and developing improvements with clear business outcomes.
You are structured, dependable, and have a “get the job done” attitude. Your ability to build strong relationships and communicate effectively is key to your success. You will engage with numerous stakeholders across functions and geographies.

We offer – Working at FOSS

We offer a demanding and rewarding position in an international and innovative company, a global leader in its field. You will collaborate with highly skilled professionals across multiple disciplines and contribute to the development of advanced technologies that make a real difference for our customers.

Our culture is grounded in trust and teamwork. You will find a workplace where your ideas are welcomed, and where you can make a real impact. The role involves some travel to engage with subsidiaries and customers.

Are you interested?

Submit your application and relevant documents through the link below. Please note that only applications submitted via the link will be considered. We conduct interviews on an ongoing basis, so we encourage you to apply as soon as possible.
If you have any questions about the position, please contact Anders Aastrup Søborg, SVP, R&D at: aas@foss.dk.

FOSS is committed to maintaining an inclusive culture and a diverse workforce. You can help us sustain an unbiased recruitment process by not including photo or age in your application.

Ansættelsestype: Permanent

Hjemmearbejde: Not offered

Ugentlig arbejdstid: Full-time

Working at FOSS

We work on a global scale to develop the people working at FOSS. We strive to enhance job satisfaction and motivation by constantly improving the competencies of our managers as well as following up on employee satisfaction.

We know our employees are our strongest asset.

Therefore, we emphasise, invest in and appraise our employees’ knowledge, skills and attitudes, and take pride in creating an environment with trust, confidence and development. We also believe that clearly defined objectives enable people to achieve their performance potential and that the support from the immediate superior is essential. Most important of all; trained, well-motivated and competent employees are a perquisite for success in the future. We manage by values, but also clear objectives, and follow up through regular meetings between the employee and the manager. In these meetings, there is also room to discuss career aspirations and other development opportunities including internal career moves.

You will have the opportunity for internal career development.

As a company, we are small enough for you to get high influence in the job, but we are also big enough for complex development and global careers. If you want to move in a new direction and continue to develop along with your professional capable colleagues, we offer the opportunity for internal career moves inside FOSS. As we are a knowledge-heavy company, this is a win-win scenario for both FOSS and our employees.

Work with creative and professionally strong colleagues.

Teamwork is essential to FOSS. By developing solutions in cross-functional teams, we integrate knowledge, experience and competences from many perspectives to achieve great results. We communicate in a straight-forward manner and solve challenges together. In FOSS, we truly value that you voice your opinion, take responsibility and ownership. Our company size in turn allows for independent, dynamic and fast decisions.

If you join FOSS, we promise you that you will enter an environment with new learnings through projects, new technologies and market opportunities. We love to be entrepreneurial and open-minded to new ideas, and if you get a good idea – you can bring it forward.

Join a company with a clear business idea and purpose, but also strong values.

In a global world with a growing population, there is an ever-increasing demand for safer food, production that is more efficient and less food waste. Globally, we need to produce as much food the next 40 years as the last 8,000 years to meet the needs of a growing population and declining natural resources. A huge challenge, which requires that we become better at utilizing the resources available.

The business vision of FOSS to contribute to a more sustainable use of increasingly valuable agricultural resources, and to the nutrition and health of the people of the world. We provide the industry’s best analytics, which add value to our customers by improving quality and optimising food and agricultural production.

Join FOSS, and you will be part of this mission, more relevant today than ever.

About FOSS

FOSS creates end-to-end solutions that secure and improve food quality. From raw material to finished product. Our analysis instruments refine measurements into information management that enables businesses to run intelligent data-driven productions with less waste and bigger yields. Controlling cost and quality across all sectors and value chains, we help food and agricultural producers limit the number of human errors, scale their business faster and reduce manual labour as well as labour costs. We call it analytics beyond measure.

Over the last 60 years, we have made it our business to define the standard of analytical solutions for the food and agricultural industry. We pioneered advanced analysis for the challenging production environments in the 1960’s, and we were the first to integrate chemical composition analysis in process lines. Now our resolve and ambition have also made us the international benchmark in the field of chemometrics and real time analytics.

FOSS is a 100% family-owned company and the leading supplier of innovative analytical solutions; 98 percent of FOSS’ business is generated outside Denmark. FOSS has more than 100 patents and more than 20 world-first product introductions. FOSS employs more than 1700 dedicated people worldwide and has manufacturing, research and development facilities in Denmark and China. Solutions are sold and supported through FOSS sales and service companies in 28 countries and by more than 75 distributors. Many employees have a top-level scientific or technical background, including more than 130 Master of Science and more than 20 PhDs in areas such as photonics, chemometrics, physical chemistry, analytical chemistry, fermentation and bio-engineering, astrophysics, optical communication, physics, quality, nanotechnology, food science and adaptive radiotherapy. We also employ many factory-trained and certified support engineers stationed close to our customers.