RD&A Lead Turkiye

About Kerry

About the role

The RD&A Lead Türkiye drives innovation and leads the R&D team across Beverage, Bakery, Confectionary, Savory, Sauces and Syrups categories for Retail and Food Service channels and regulatory teams. The role focuses on building portfolio with authentic taste, delivering market-relevant taste and functional solutions, managing project pipelines, customer satisfaction, and collaborating cross-functionally to support growth plans and investments in Turkey. It combines technical expertise, customer engagement, and strategic innovation to meet evolving needs in Türkiye markets.

Reporting to:  General Manager, Türkiye & Iraq

Work Location:  Istanbul, Turkiye

Key responsibilities

• Lead and manage the R&D team and Regulatory team for key end-use markets (Beverage, Bakery, Confectionary, Savory, Sauces and Syrups across Retail and Food Service channels in Türkiye.
• Oversee the project pipeline and manage resource allocation to build local taste portfolio and drive business growth across all categories, supporting the Türkiye R&D Center.
• Collaborate closely with Operations, Sales, Marketing, and Regulatory, and related teams to deliver integrated, innovative, and market-relevant solutions.
• Develop commercially viable taste and functional solutions from brief to launch, based on robust formulation, application, and processing.
• Leverage Kerry’s taste portfolio and partner with the taste creation team to deliver winning solutions.
• Innovate with locally relevant taste profiles tailored to regional preferences.
• Engage with customers and suppliers to co-create solutions and resolve technical challenges, building strong technical relationships.
• Drive innovation in new product development and identify new business opportunities aligned with customer and consumer needs in Türkiye.
• Demonstrate strong technical expertise in flavour systems and functional ingredients.
• Identify and evaluate technologies and ingredients for new product development and product improvement, leveraging existing capabilities for innovation.
• Support product scale-ups and commercialization with sound operational understanding.
• Stay current on industry best practices and competitor benchmarks to maintain Kerry’s leadership in product development.
• Leading the Regulatory team in Türkiye to ensure that all products and processes comply with relevant legislation.
• Providing strategic compliance support to project teams together with the Regulatory team.
• Ensuring the coordination and representation of the team in regulatory processes conducted with customers and authorities.
• Collaborate with relevant departments in existing and emerging processes related to the function; perform duties in alignment with Kerry’s values, demonstrating open-mindedness, inclusiveness, and ownership.

Qualifications and skills

• Preferably a minimum Bachelors/Master’s Degree in Food Science/Technology, Chemistry or a related Applied Science.
• Preferably a minimum of 10 years' experience working and leading application teams.
• Prior experience of developing a variety of solutions. Raw material knowledge and ingredient functionality, Sensory evaluation skills.
• Demonstrate personal accountability, collaborative approach, Open minded, self-starter and ownership of actions to completion.
• Technical and functional excellence in laboratory, pilot plant and factory environment.
• Demonstrate a strong initiative and a hands-on approach, ability to prioritise.
• Excellent ability to communicate effectively.
• Innovation and Creativity.
• Customer engagement.
• Fluent in Turkish and English to liaise with stakeholders across the world. 
• Team management experience preferred.