Company Overview

At TruNativ, we’re redefining the way India thinks about nutrition. Health isn’t just about recovery or aging it’s about living at your peak, every single day.

The shift is happening: from addressing deficiencies to proactively optimizing well-being. And we’re leading this movement with science-backed, effortless nutrition solutions designed for up-to-date lifestyles. We’re not just a brand; we’re a revolution in how nutrition fits seamlessly into daily life making better health accessible, achievable, and sustainable for everyone.

If you’re passionate about innovation, impact, and transforming lives, join us in shaping the future of nutrition!

#TruNativ #FuelBetter #JoinTheMovement #NowHiring

Trunativ has been recently backed by Emami Limited & Mr. Nithin Kamath - Zerodha Rainmatter.

Know more about us: http://www.trunativ.co

Role: Senior Application Scientist - Confectionery

Department: R&D;

Location: Andheri, Lower Oshiwara (100% Work from Office)

Reports to: R&D; Director

About the role

Confectionery is where sugar reduction gets genuinely difficult, because in most confectionery the sugar is not an ingredient, it is the product. Take it out and you lose bulk, structure, texture and shelf life in a single move. Adding protein and fibre into the same products brings its own set of problems.

You own that category for TruNativ, across chocolate and compound, bars, gummies, sugar confectionery and coated products. You will solve it for manufacturers who buy our ingredient systems, and for TruNativ’s own launches in the space.

What you will be doing

1- Product development and applications

- Developing across the confectionery range: moulded and enrobed chocolate and compound, protein and nutrition bars, cereal and fruit bars, gummies and jellies, hard-boiled sweets and lozenges, toffees and chews, panned and coated products, and Indian sweet formats.
- Building prototypes on our protein, fibre and natural sweetener systems for customers and for our own range.
- Turning a customer brief into a formulation, a process, a cost and a timeline that stand up to scrutiny.
- Rebuilding what sugar was doing once it comes out: bulk, body, texture, mouthfeel, water activity and shelf life. Sweetness is the easy part of that job.
- Working protein and fibre into confectionery formats without ending up with something hard, sandy, sticky or unpleasant to eat.
- Managing the problems that show up in storage rather than on day one: hardening, stickiness, bloom, graining, cold flow and colour change.
- Getting the sweetness profile right. Onset, intensity, linger, cooling effect and off-notes, and how much masking a system will take before it tastes masked.
- Formulating to a cost and offering the customer a realistic trade-off between performance and price.




- Maintaining a library of standard formulations, prototypes and reference samples across the formats you cover.

2- Lab, pilot and plant trials

- Running the full ladder: bench trials first, then pilot batches, then trials on a commercial line. Plan the trial, prepare the ingredient kit, brief the line team, log the parameters, pull samples at the right points and write it up afterwards.
- Scaling formulations from lab to plant and holding performance when the batch size, the equipment and the process all change at once.
- Travelling to customer plants and co-packers across India, spending the day on the floor and troubleshooting live rather than over email.
- Reading a line before you run on it. Understanding what cooking, depositing, moulding, enrobing and panning equipment can and cannot do, and formulating for the equipment the customer actually has.
- Building and running the confectionery bench at our Oshiwara lab: equipment, methods, working standards and housekeeping.
- Keeping proper records. Batch sheets, trial reports, deviations and outcomes, so a trial can be repeated by someone else six months later.

3- Shelf life, quality and sensory

- Designing and running shelf-life studies, real time and accelerated, and giving an honest call on shelf life rather than an optimistic one.
- Running sensory evaluation and internal tasting panels, and feeding what comes out of them back into the formulation.
- Benchmarking against competitor products in the market and being straight about where we stand against them.
- Working with QA on specifications, testing protocols and coordination with external labs.
- Investigating complaints and failures when they come back from a customer, and closing them out with a fix rather than an explanation.

4- Suppliers and sourcing

- Working with ingredient suppliers directly. Sourcing samples, reviewing specifications and documentation, running like-for-like comparisons and qualifying alternates.
- Evaluating new ingredients on merit rather than on the brochure, and keeping a view on what is coming into the market.
- Supporting sourcing on vendor qualification, second sources and costing, and flagging early when an ingredient is going to be a supply problem.
- Building relationships with supplier technical teams so that when something breaks at 11 at night, someone picks up.

5- Regulatory and nutrition

- Keeping everything you develop inside FSSAI requirements: product standards for chocolate,



confectionery and sugar-free products, permitted additives and limits, labelling and claims.
- Building and checking nutrition panels, and making sure every claim on the pack is supported by the formulation and by the lab report behind it.
- Working to nutrition frameworks and claim thresholds, and saying so early when a brief asks for a claim the formulation cannot carry.
- Supporting export briefs where the regulations and labelling requirements are different from ours.
- Keeping the technical documentation in order: specifications, ingredient declarations, allergen information and supporting data.

Working with the rest of the business

- Supporting the sales and business development team on customer visits, technical presentations and sample submissions.
- Writing the material customers actually use: application notes, starting formulations, dosage guidelines, trial reports and troubleshooting guides.
- Training customer teams and internal colleagues on how our ingredients behave and how to work with them.
- Feeding back what you hear in the market, so that what the lab develops and what customers are asking for stay in the same place.
- Managing your own projects and timelines across several customers at once, and being realistic with everyone about what lands when.

What we are looking for

- 5 to 9 years in confectionery or chocolate product development or applications, at a manufacturer or in an ingredient supplier’s application lab.
- B.Tech, M.Tech or M.Sc in Food Technology, Dairy Technology or equivalent.
- Genuinely hands-on. You are in the lab doing the work, not describing it.
- Practical experience of pilot and plant trials, and comfortable spending a full day on a factory floor.
- Experience dealing with ingredient suppliers, including evaluating samples and qualifying alternates.
- Working knowledge of FSSAI regulations relevant to confectionery and chocolate, including labelling and claims.
- A sound understanding of nutrition frameworks, nutrition labelling and the thresholds behind common claims.
- Products you have taken from brief to market, and the honesty to talk about the ones that did not work.
- Comfortable in front of a customer’s technical team and able to hold your ground on a technical point.
- Clear written English. Application notes and trial reports are a real part of this job.
- Willing to travel within India for trials and customer visits.
- Practical experience with sugar-free and reduced-sugar confectionery and the compromises each sweetener system forces on you.

Useful, not essential

- Protein or nutrition bar development.
- Experience in an application lab serving B2B customers.
- Panning, coating and inclusion work.
- Exposure to export markets.

Immediate joiners or candidates serving their notice period are preferred.

📌 Senior Application Scientist — Confectionery (Mumbai)
🏢 TruNativ
📍 Mumbai