Purpose of the Role To be the culinary engine of the RCPL daily essential business division translating consumer taste preferences, regional palate insights, and market gaps into spice blends and value-added food products that consumers choose over competition, repeatedly.

Core Roles & Responsibilities

1. Competitive Benchmarking & Market Intelligence

- Continuously buy, cook with, taste, and deconstruct competitor products MDH, Everest, Catch, Shan, Tata Sampann, regional players and private labels
- Maintain a living sensory database of competitor profiles: aroma, heat level, color intensity, texture, aftertaste, pungency, and regional character
- Identify white spaces what taste profiles are missing or underserved in the market
- Track new product launches in the category within India and internationally (Middle East, UK Indian diaspora markets) for inspiration

2. Consumer Taste Understanding

- Develop a working understanding of regional palate differences across key markets: North (heavier, robust), South (more tamarind, curry leaf, coconut), West (sweeter notes, Maharashtrian vs. Gujarati profiles), East (mustard-forward, milder heat)
- Translate consumer language ("it should taste homemade", "not too oily a smell", "brighter color after cooking") into actionable formulation direction
- Build and chair an internal sensory panel; train team members on structured tasting protocols (CATA, descriptive analysis)
- Participate in consumer research not just review reports, but sit in on focus groups, in-home usage tests, and taste panels to hear consumers in their own words

3. Product Development & Formulation

- Lead bench-level development of current spice blends, masalas, marinades, cooking pastes, and other value-added formats from brief to prototype
- Develop products with a clearly defined sensory target brief before formulation begins (not reverse-engineered after)




- Work with food technologists and flavor houses to achieve the target profile at commercial scale while maintaining authentic taste character
- Ensure every prototype is benchmarked against the leading competitor product side-by-side before it moves to consumer testing
- Own the recipe/formulation documentation with full ingredient specs, ratios, critical control parameters, and cooking-use instructions

4. Existing Portfolio Improvement & NPIs

- Audit current product portfolio against competitors on a quarterly basis
- Identify products where the company is losing on taste, and build an improvement roadmap with timelines
- Drive reformulation projects without disrupting quality or supply, working with procurement on ingredient changes

5. Scale-Up & Manufacturing Liaison

- Translate kitchen-scale prototypes into plant-scale manufacturing realities work directly with Cateory /Production teams to ensure the taste developed at bench survives blending, grinding, and packaging at scale
- Conduct plant trials personally; sign off on production batches only when sensory benchmarks are met
- Flag ingredient quality deviations from procurement that affect taste and work with the QA team to set sensory acceptance criteria for raw materials

6. Culinary Application & Go-to-Market Support

- Develop and standardize recipe applications for each product (how a homemaker in Lucknow or Coimbatore will use this) these feed into packaging, digital content, and sales material
- Support the marketing team with demonstrations, food photography shoots, digital recipe content,



and chef-led videos be the credible culinary voice of the brand
- Provide culinary inputs for claims (e.g., "authentic dhaba taste", "restaurant-style at home") only claims the product can actually deliver

7. Trend & Ingredient Watch

- Monitor emerging ingredient trends: regional superfoods, functional spices (turmeric curcumin content, black pepper piperine), clean-label preferences, low-sodium demands
- Bring at least 23 consumer-validated innovation concepts to the pipeline each quarter
- Maintain relationships with spice-growing regions (Guntur, Rajasthan, Kerala, Coorg) to understand raw material quality variation and how it impacts taste

What This Role Is Accountable For

- Win rate on blind taste tests vs. named competitor products in consumer research (target: clear preference or parity on all core SKUs)
- Time from brief to consumer-ready prototype speed matters; innovation pipeline velocity
- Score on structured sensory benchmarking against competition across portfolio
- Consumer repeat purchase intent on new products (tracked through post-launch research)
- Zero taste deviation complaints from production batches flagged as approved

What This Role Is NOT

- Not a food production/manufacturing role the chef is an innovator, not a factory supervisor
- Not a marketing role culinary inputs support marketing, but campaign strategy is not this role's domain
- Not purely a recipe developer for social media content is a byproduct, not the primary output

Key Interfaces FunctionNature of InteractionProcurementInput on spice quality specs; early involvement when sourcing changesQuality AssuranceDefine sensory acceptance criteria; review production batch sign-offsMarketingBrief-to-product handoff; culinary support for campaignsSalesFeedback loop from trade and consumersConsumer InsightsPrimary partner for consumer validation of prototypes

📌 Chef (Bengaluru)
🏢 Reliance Industries (RIL)
📍 Bengaluru