Assistant Development Chef

About McCain. At McCain, we’re feeding the world: from French fries to Smiles, we contribute to the important role food plays in people's lives. That’s why we’re dedicated to ensuring our core values—Family, Authentic, Trusted, and Quality—shine through every day. As a privately owned family company with over 60 years of experience, a presence in more than 160 countries, and a global team of 22,000 people, our values and culture are at the heart of everything we do. We believe that we can work together, along with our business and community partners, to bring sustainable growth and positive change today, tomorrow, and for generations to come.

Why join the McCain family.

• Your Life – we’re here to help you fulfil your potential, flourish, and thrive in work and life.
• Your Success – work alongside passionate individuals who are committed to supporting your career ambitions, drive, and success.
• Your Impact – we want you to make a meaningful, lasting impact for you, for your colleagues, and for the business.

About The Role. Are you passionate about food, flavour, and culinary innovation? Do you love bringing ideas to life and creating memorable dining experiences that truly resonate with customers? If you’re driven by creativity and thrive in a fast-paced, customer-focused environment, this could be the perfect opportunity for you.

We’re looking for an enthusiastic Assistant Development Chef to play a key role in delivering culinary excellence to both external and internal customers. Using your in-depth culinary knowledge and genuine passion for food, you’ll work closely with the Business Development Chef, as well as the Category and Sales teams, to gain a deep understanding of customer needs and market trends. You’ll help translate insights into inspiring, practical, and commercially viable food solutions—showcasing how our product range can be creatively integrated to add real value.

You’ll also support the planning, preparation, and delivery of customer-facing presentations, tastings, and events, helping to bring concepts to life and leave a lasting impression. This is a hands-on role where innovation, collaboration, and attention to detail are key—ideal for a chef who’s excited to develop their career beyond the kitchen while staying firmly connected to food.

If you’re ready to combine your culinary expertise with creativity, teamwork, and customer insight, we’d love to hear from you.

Accountabilities.

• Develop a deep understanding of customer operations by conducting unit calls, market reviews, and targeted web-based research. Use these insights to inform product recommendations, serving suggestions, and continuous product improvement opportunities.
• Build and maintain strong relationships with customer food teams, enabling early visibility of account changes, challenges, and opportunities, and ensuring proactive, solutions-focused support.
• Deliver engaging product training to the sales team, clearly communicating product features and benefits to strengthen the overall customer proposition.
• Champion our passion for food internally and externally, acting as a culinary ambassador for the brand.
• Collaborate as part of a cross-functional team to plan and deliver trade shows, exhibitions, bespoke customer events, and ad hoc internal presentations, ensuring consistent, compelling food-led storytelling.
• Work closely with Marketing, Innovation, and Insights teams across categories to support the development of new products, helping to shape optimum, sector-specific product propositions grounded in real customer needs.
• Coordinate benchmarking activity to evaluate the performance of McCain products against key competitors, clearly documenting outcomes and learnings.
• Ensure results, insights, and recommendations are clearly communicated across relevant teams and actively embedded into customer-facing activity and commercial decision-making.

Qualifications

• Proven experience working within a culinary or product development environment, ideally in a customer-facing role where food is at the heart of the conversation.
• A minimum of 3–5 years’ hands-on culinary experience, demonstrating strong craft skills, technical ability, and confidence working across a variety of food applications.
• Solid knowledge of the foodservice market, with a clear understanding of customer operations, sector demands, and evolving consumer expectations.
• A genuine passion for food, paired with a willingness to continuously learn, stay ahead of emerging food trends, and translate inspiration into practical, commercial solutions.
• Food Safety Level 2 certification (essential), with a strong awareness of food standards, compliance, and best practice.
• Confident product showcasing and presentation skills, with the ability to bring products to life through engaging demonstrations and tastings.
• Strong communication skills, capable of clearly conveying ideas, benefits, and recommendations to a range of audiences, from sales teams to customer food specialists.
• A natural relationship builder, able to establish trust and credibility through collaboration, insight, and shared passion for food.
• Evidence of successful new product development (NPD) experience, supported by strong commercial awareness and an understanding of how culinary solutions drive business performance.
• A full, clean driving licence, with the flexibility to travel as required to support customers and business needs.

Location. Being in the office every single day is a thing of the past. Here at McCain, we champion hybrid working. This means we don’t have a set expectation of exactly when you need to be in the office – however we do encourage our full-time, office-based people to connect in person with others for around half of their working time as that’s the best way for us to build and maintain our connections.

The Benefits Of Working For McCain. Although we do encourage you to taste the goods you’ll be pleased to know we don’t pay you in ‘chips’. For working hard, you’ll also get a great salary and some pretty good benefits including:

• A generous Car Allowance
• An excellent pension where we will pay double what you do, up to a maximum of 12% of your pay
• Flexible holidays – where you can buy & sell up to 5 days holiday per year
• Optional health cash plan
• Cycle to work scheme
• Chips In Volunteering Day Off - to make a positive impact to the competitiveness, resilience, and long-term development of McCain communities across the globe

McCain Foods is an equal opportunity employer. As a global family-owned company, we strive to be the employer of choice in the diverse communities around the world in which we live and work. We recognize that inclusion drives our creativity, resilience, and success and makes our business stronger.