Food Inventors — a delicious fusion of technology and creativity.
In 1894, W.K Kellogg, a former broom salesman, accidentally left a pot of boiled wheat out overnight. Intrigued by the way it softened the wheat, he rolled it out and baked it, and each grain became a crispy flake. He tried this with corn, inventing corn flakes, and in doing so forever changed how the world eats breakfast.
Fast forward a century (and a bit), and you can now purchase a breakfast cereal for everything from functional diets to political preferences.
Great invention has the power to change the world, and right now the world needs this more than ever. If our food systems and our eating behaviours don’t change, we will not be able to sustain life on this earth.
At Vow, the concepts of food and invention are inseparable, we produce meat by growing animal cells instead of the animals themselves. Cellular agriculture is the greatest revolution in agriculture of the last 10,000 years and so far, it’s been applied to trying to create faithful replicas of existing animal products, like cell-based beef burgers and chicken nuggets.
We believe we can invent better than this. We do not seek to replicate the foods of outdated systems. We actually reject the notion that classic is best (move over fillet steak!) and we are not beholden to the standards of other meat products. Instead, we started with a different question altogether:
What is the perfect eating experience for any meat?
It’s this question that has been the foundation of our company’s journey so far and one that we believe will ultimately lead us to invent products that are, for billions of people, both irresistible and sustainable.
The Food Inventor
We’ve realised to achieve this, we need to create a new kind of role, and we’re calling it the Food Inventor.
Our Food Inventors are like Disney’s Imagineers — one job title for many different kinds of people, each with different backgrounds and skillsets, working super hard to solve unique problems together. Imagineers wear many hats and learn many new concepts outside their own unique training, and it was this approach to multi-functional teams that allowed Disney to reinvent the theme park into a fairytale experience, why revolutionising physical storytelling and animatronics along the way.
In a similar vein, our Food Inventors will need to become incredible, multi-disciplinary creators. They will be directly responsible for creating moments of sensory delight for our customers. Vow’s food team is not a place for specialists alone, or rather, it is a place for the aspiring food polymath. We’re look for talented individuals who have the capacity to learn anything thrown their way but who also shine with expertise in a particular area (like food science, food processing, material science, or even design and operations). This particular brand of talented folks are called T-Shaped people.
T-Shaped people excel at adapting to new challenges with lot’s of different skills and perspectives, working together, to produce breakthroughs in food product design. One day a food inventor will be learning the ins and outs of novel extrusion systems, another day testing ingredient compounds and how they contribute to the perfect Maillard reaction, while on another you might be defining the perfect shape and form for our product. Thriving at Vow is all about determination to learn new things constantly.
Some of the talented skillsets we’re looking for:
- Food product developers
- Food scientists
- Chefs (R&D, Product development, Fine dining, executive chefs — no limits)
- Material scientists
- Biochemists
- Flavourists
We need you to tell us what unique facet you bring to a food invention team. Tell us how you’re more than your specialisation. To be considered for this role, you must tell us how you’re uniquely positioned to help us understand and solve the problems we’ll face (see below). If you’re not listed above but are perfect for a Food Inventor role then tell us why.
A non-exhaustive list of some of the problems we need to solve:
- Developing rich texture systems
- Delivering a journey of flavour, with unique bliss points
- Ensuring the perfect levels of lubricity
- Integrating the right fat system in the right ratios
- Finding epic dynamic contrast between a moisture-rich interior and Maillard-reaction-rich exterior
- Developing a food colour palette that’s striking to the eye
- Sourcing and evolving the perfect processing technology to achieve the above (batching, grinding, extruding, drying, further processing and beyond)
- Developing a packaging system that creates an experience as rich as the food itself
- Creating fortified nutrition profiles that solve human health problems
What we expect to see:
- Clear and obvious experience creating innovative food products
- A specialisation in a relevant discipline backed by years of experience and/or academic accolades.
- A demonstrated track record of facing into really sticky problems and coming out with unique solutions (and sometimes hacky ones)
- Experience (or willingness to) seek counsel from experts (including ones you’ve never met!)
- You know how to ask the right questions — and then formulate and undertake research to answer them
- Experience thriving in cross-functional teams — your previous teams would rave about you
- A demonstrated ability to think creatively, either with new inventions or new ways of working
- A history of self-actualisation — you’re committed to growing quickly as a professional and as a human
It would also be a total bonus (but not mandatory) if you have experience with the following:
- Plant-based meats / foods
- Animal meat products / animal meat science
- Cultured meat
- Fat systems
- Processing techniques for enhancing texture
- Flavour encapsulation
What you’ll get:
- The freedom to take risks and get creative
- Competitive salary
- A team of 43(and growing) that is focussed on bringing the whole human to work while constantly raising the bar of personal performance
- Ownership in the company through our Employee Stock Ownership Plan
- An epic and inspiring space to work in every day
Our culinary centre feels like a combination of elBulli’s test kitchen and the experimental space from Modernist Cuisine. (Only ours comes with the addition of a beautiful converted-warehouse office, a state-of-the-art biological lab and is nestled in the leafy inner-Sydney suburb of Alexandria.)
Does this sound like you? You can apply to be one of our Food Inventors here.
