Senior Application Manager - Food & Beverage Applications

Role Overview

This role puts you at the head of the application laboratory for an international flavour and food technology business, working out of Nairobi. Day to day you translate customer briefs into working beverage and sweet-food prototypes — adjusting formulations at the bench, checking them through sensory and stability testing, then steering the successful version through factory trials and into full-scale production. It matters because the lab is where a commercial promise becomes something a factory can actually make: the regional portfolio, the key-account relationships and the growth pipeline all rest on how well this function performs.

Key Responsibilities

• Direct beverage and sweet-food formulation and application work in the laboratory, starting from competitive benchmarking and recipe design and carrying through sensory evaluation and stability assessment.
• Run customer development projects end to end, from the first concept discussion through prototyping, trial, scale-up and handover to commercial production.
• Manage customer trials and factory trials, including scale-up, and resolve the formulation or processing problems that surface when a recipe moves onto production equipment.
• Serve as the technical partner to sales teams and customers, advising on formulation choices, processing parameters and manufacturing constraints.
• Build and maintain the local and regional application portfolio so it stays aligned with what the market is actually asking for.
• Watch for emerging food and beverage trends and convert them into concrete product opportunities for customers.
• Lead, coach and develop the application technicians, setting technical standards and growing the team's formulation capability.
• Collaborate with global R&D, flavour creation and commercial colleagues, support key-account strategies and regional business development, and make sure all application activity meets quality, food-safety and regulatory requirements.

Requirements & Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Food Science & Technology, Chemistry, Pharmacy or a comparable discipline.
• Seven to ten or more years of experience in the food and beverage industry.
• Substantial hands-on background in food and beverage product development and applications, with particularly strong beverage formulation experience.
• Practical working knowledge of pH, Brix, acidity, viscosity and sensory testing methods.
• Experience in a food or beverage manufacturing environment.
• Demonstrated project-management and technical leadership capability, including developing junior technical staff.
• Confident customer-facing manner and clear communication skills.
• Working knowledge of food regulations across African markets.
• Comfort with CRM tools; familiarity with Salesforce is an advantage.
• Excellent written and spoken English; French or another language is a plus.
• Willingness to travel roughly 30% of the time.

What This Role Offers

• Leadership of an application laboratory within an international flavour and food technology company that serves food and beverage manufacturers across regional and international markets.
• A genuinely hands-on position that blends technical formulation, customer project ownership, team leadership and commercial support rather than separating them.
• Direct exposure to customers from initial concept and formulation through to industrial production.
• Regular collaboration with global R&D, technical, flavour and commercial teams.
• Ownership of a regional application portfolio and involvement in key-account and business-development work.
• Travel of approximately 30%, supporting customers and projects across markets.