R&D Director, Global Dairy Ingredients

R&D Director, Global Dairy Ingredients

Land O'Lakes is seeking a R&D Director, Global Dairy Ingredients (GDI) to set technical strategy and lead product development across our dairy-based seasonings and ingredients, dairy protein platforms, and commodity dairy ingredients.

As a customer-facing leader on the R&D leadership team, you will translate customer, commercial, and manufacturing needs into scalable solutions, build technical capability and talent, and position R&D to deliver on current commitments and future growth in high-value dairy ingredients.

Key Responsibilities

Customer-Facing Product Development & Commercialization


* Lead end-to-end B2B product development across dairy-based seasonings and ingredients, dairy protein powders, and GDI commodity ingredients.


* Represent R&D as the senior technical partner in strategic customer engagements, co-development sessions, product demonstrations, qualification reviews, and issue resolution.


* Ensure technical solutions are scalable, manufacturable, repeatable, compliant, and aligned with customer expectations, product specifications, and business value.

Portfolio Strategy, Prioritization & Capability Roadmaps


* Own the GDI product development strategy and roadmap, translating commercial strategy, customer segmentation, and manufacturing realities into clearly prioritized technical work.


* Make resource and priority tradeoffs visible; balance urgent customer needs with foundational learning and longer-term capability building.


* Build technical roadmaps for high-value dairy proteins, commodity ingredient optimization, dairy-based seasoning systems, and emerging customer applications.

People Leadership, Talent Development & Succession


* Lead, coach, and develop managers, scientists, technologists, and technical contributors; set clear expectations for technical rigor, customer responsiveness, and execution discipline.


* Create role clarity, decision rights, development plans, and succession plans to build leadership depth and technical bench strength for the GDI platform.


* Foster a culture of ownership, collaboration, inclusion, continuous improvement, learning, and disciplined documentation.

Cross-Functional Integration & Technical Sales Support


* Partner closely with Sales, Marketing, Strategic Operations, Manufacturing, Quality, Regulatory, Procurement, Finance, and Supply Chain to enable faster decisions and better handoffs from concept to launch.


* Support technical selling by translating product functionality, application performance, processing constraints, and customer value into clear messages for technical and non-technical audiences.


* Serve as the escalation point for technical risk, prioritization, customer-impacting issues, and commercialization tradeoffs.

External Partnerships, Market Foresight & Continuous Improvement


* Maintain awareness of customer, market, competitive, regulatory, and technology trends...