Development Chef in Leicester

Join the Samworth Brothers Team and become part of our dynamic family! At Samworth Brothers, we genuinely care about our colleagues and strive to create an engaging environment that values your unique contributions. We are committed to your success and offer a range of exceptional benefits that we believe supports your life and personal aspirations:

• Enhanced pension scheme
• Private health scheme
• Employee discount scheme
• Experience annual pay reviews
• Profit related pay
• Unlock your potential through training and growth opportunities

Are you a passionate, creative chef looking to take your career to the next level? Or an experienced Development Chef ready to shape the future of savoury pastry? We are looking for a Development Chef — or a talented, ambitious chef ready to quickly grow into the role — to join our dynamic NPD team at The Cornwall Bakery. This is an exciting opportunity to help create innovative, market‐leading products that delight customers and drive our business forward. As a Development Chef, you will play a key part in taking ideas from concept to launch. You will develop high‐quality recipes and products, interpret customer briefs, identify emerging food trends, and help bring big ideas to life. You will work closely with colleagues across NPD, Process, Technical, Operations, Category and Commercial, supporting customer engagement, driving innovation, and helping us stay ahead of the competition.

Key Responsibilities:

• Lead NPD and EPD projects, developing creative, trend‐led product concepts that meet customer briefs and business strategy.
• Collaborate with cross‐functional teams to evaluate insights, opportunities and capabilities to create commercially viable products.
• Prepare and present high‐quality samples, product concepts and demonstrations to internal teams and customers.
• Support recipe accuracy, feasibility stages, system data input, and the full concept‐to‐launch process.
• Champion a culture of quality and innovation across the bakery, supporting product launches and continuous improvement.

The Ideal Candidate:

• Proven experience as a chef or product technologist, ideally within chilled food manufacturing.
• Strong culinary skill, natural creativity, and passion for food trends and flavour development.
• Confidence presenting products and delivering cooking demonstrations to a high standard.
• Strong teamwork, organisation and communication skills, with the ability to work under pressure.
• Good IT literacy (Excel, PowerPoint, Word) and a full UK driving licence.

We also want you to thrive in an engaging and inclusive work culture where you will have the opportunity to take on personal accountability and take pride in your work. We encourage positive communication, and the building of strong collaborative relationships is essential to every role. Join us at Samworth Brothers, where you will be more than just a team member – you will be an integral part of our thriving family. Apply today and embark on an exciting journey with us!

About Us: We are a fourth-generation family business producing high quality own‐label products for many of the UK’s best‐known retailers along with our own brands including Ginsters, Soreen, Higgidy, Dickinson & Morris, Urban Eat, West Cornwall Pasty Company and Walker & Son. We employ over 10,000 people in well‐invested modern food manufacturing sites around the country. At Samworth Brothers we take pride in our family feel within our businesses and work together to make things happen. We can offer you the stability of a wider group as well as the opportunities that that offers if you wish to progress your career with us. We are family and we would like to invite you to be part of that and support our teams in delivering great products to all of our customers.