Dil Brands is a company that creates and operates virtual brands focused on fulfilling daily meal requirements in India. Through its virtual brands, Dil Brands helps small and medium-sized restaurants increase their asset and resources utilization.
We are seeking an experienced and innovative Process-Driven hands-on Asst R&D Chef, to join our culinary team.
The ideal candidate should have strong knowledge of multi-cuisine cooking, recipe development, production processes, food costing, yield management, and recipe standardization. The candidate will work closely with the R&D and Production teams to ensure that every recipe is commercially viable, consistently executable, and meets the defined quality and cost parameters.
Key Responsibilities- Develop new recipes and products across multiple cuisines and food categories as per the guidelines shared by the Brand Curation team.
- Conduct kitchen trials and improve recipes based on taste, texture, appearance, yield, and commercial feasibility.
- Standardize recipes with precise ingredient specifications, quantities, UOM, cooking methods, process steps, yields, and portion sizes.
- Prepare detailed recipe cards and SOPs for finalized products.
- Conduct trials to ensure consistency between small-batch and bulk production.
- Convert R and D-tested recipes into bulk-production recipes.
- Determine appropriate batch sizes and ingredient ratios for large-scale production.
- Optimize recipes to ensure consistency, productivity, yield, and operational feasibility.
- Identify potential production challenges during scale-up and develop practical solutions.
- Calculate the complete food cost of every recipe using approved ingredient prices.
- Maintain recipe costs within the defined cost bracket / target food-cost percentage.
- Identify high-cost ingredients and develop suitable alternatives or process improvements without compromising product quality.
- Monitor yield, wastage, portion size, and ingredient utilization to maintain cost control.
- Conduct complete R&D-to-Production handover for all finalized products.
- Train the Production team on recipe, process, batch size, cooking parameters, yield, quality standards, and critical control points.
- Ensure production teams understand and follow the finalized recipe and SOP.
- Support the Production team during initial production batches and resolve process-related issues.
- Ensure all finalized products meet defined standards for taste, texture, appearance, portion size, yield, and cost.
- Conduct sensory evaluation and comparative product trials.
- Identify deviations during trials or production and implement corrective actions.
- Maintain updated recipe cards, costing sheets, trial reports, batch sheets, and production SOPs.
- Ensure all finalized recipes have complete documentation before production handover.
Candidate Profile- Degree/Diploma in Hotel Management, Culinary Arts, or a related field.
- 3–6 years of relevant culinary/R&D experience, preferably in QSR, cloud kitchen, frozen food manufacturing, central kitchen, FMCG, or large-scale food production.
- Strong hands-on experience in multi-cuisine food development.
- Good understanding of commercial recipe costing and food-cost management.
- Experience in scaling recipes from trial quantities to bulk production.
- Strong knowledge of recipe standardization and SOP development.
- Good understanding of food yields, portion control, wastage, and production efficiency.
- Strong communication and training skills.
- Comfortable working hands-on in a fast-paced R&D and production environment.
