Senior Application Scientist - Bakery

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 modern 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 - Bakery
Department: R&D
Location: Andheri, Lower Oshiwara (100% Work from Office)
Reports to: R&D Director
About the role
You own bakery for TruNativ. That covers the full spread of baked and bakery-adjacent products, and it covers both sides of the business: applications for manufacturers who buy our ingredient systems, and development of TruNativ’s own products in the category.
Most of what comes across your bench is one of three briefs. Put more protein into a product without wrecking the texture. Add fibre without making it heavy or dry. Take the sugar out and keep the product tasting and behaving like the original. The categories change, the brief usually does not.
What you will be doing
1- Product development and applications
• Developing across the full bakery range: breads and buns, biscuits and cookies, crackers and savoury baked snacks, cakes and muffins, rusks and toasts, bars, and traditional Indian baked and sweet formats.
• Building working prototypes on our protein, fibre and natural sweetener systems, both for customers and for TruNativ’s own range.
• Turning a customer brief into a formulation, a process, a cost and a timeline that all hold together.
• Working through what protein, fibre and sweetener changes do to dough and batter behaviour, machinability, volume, colour, texture and eating quality, and then fixing what they break.
• Solving the problems these ingredients reliably create: hardness, dryness, poor volume, dense crumb, off-notes and shorter shelf life.
• Developing clean-label solutions where customers want the ingredient list to stay short.
• Formulating to a cost. Building the version that performs and the version the customer can actually afford to sell.
• Reformulating existing customer products to hit a new nutrition target without the consumer noticing the change.
• Maintaining a library of standard formulations, prototypes and reference samples so we are not starting from scratch on every brief.
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 mixing, forming, proofing and baking equipment can and cannot do, and formulating for the equipment the customer actually has.
• Building and running the bakery bench at our Oshiwara lab: equipment, methods, working standards and housekeeping.
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 bakery and biscuits, 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 bakery 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 bakery and baked goods, 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.
• A practical understanding of dough and batter systems and how ingredients change their behaviour.
Useful, not essential
• High-protein, high-fibre or reduced-sugar bakery experience.
• Experience in an application lab serving B2B customers.
• Exposure to export or GCC labelling requirements.
• Experience with co-packers and contract manufacturing.
Immediate joiners or candidates serving their notice period are preferred.

Work arrangement
No