Innovation Marketing Manager

Want to build a stronger, more sustainable future and cultivate your career? Join Cargill's global team of 160,000 employees who are committed to safe, responsible and sustainable ways to nourish the world. This position is in Cargill's protein and salt business, where we provide wholesome, high-quality food products to a wide range of customers, from foodservice operators and grocery stores to manufacturers and exporters.

Job Purpose and Impact

Cargill Protein North America produces a wide range of fresh, frozen, and cooked protein solutions for our retail, foodservice and food manufacturing customers. As a customer-driven organization, Marketing plays a critical role in delivering solutions that offer distinct value to help our customers grow.

The Marketing Manager for Innovation will provide advanced knowledge of and thought leadership in innovation to influence Cargill Protein North America's approach to identify, develop, and launch product and service offerings. In this role, you will directly influence the marketing innovation vision and serve as the marketing lead for the Protein Incubator, a cross-functional team operating as an innovation accelerator, utilizing an agile toolkit and entrepreneurial mindset to improve the success rate of our consumer-led innovation initiatives. The team facilitates innovation on behalf of both our business teams and customers, co-creating solutions to help them win in the marketplace and achieve their growth ambitions.

Key Accountabilities

• Drive incremental value for the organization through innovations that develop and implement unique and compelling value propositions for customers and consumers.
• Provide expert leadership on the innovation process, from opportunity identification and ideation to validation and commercial scaling, to advance the organization's innovation performance and position Cargill as a value-added partner to our key strategic customers.
• In close collaboration with Insights, R&D, and other cross-functional partners, bring forward opportunity platforms that align with business priorities, take advantage of category growth, deliver against key customer and consumer needs, and create value for the organization.
• Provide marketing and innovation thought leadership to advance innovation pipeline development across growth-oriented product or service categories, brands, channels, and customers.
• Serve as marketing lead for innovation projects: Plan, facilitate, and oversee cross-functional support and engagement for all phases of project execution as needed.
• Fuel innovation and growth by applying advanced knowledge of proven innovation concepts and championing creativity, experimentation and learning by failure.
• Cultivate organizational innovation skills and capabilities by collaborating with and coaching cross-functional teams in best practice concepts and iterative approaches to identify innovation.
• Other duties as assigned.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in marketing or related field
• Minimum of six years of related work experience
• Working knowledge of innovation, new product development and commercialization
• Excellent project management skills and cross-functional collaboration and leadership

Preferred Qualifications

• Master's degree in marketing or related field
• Experience in marketing strategy and planning, ideally in food or consumer products
• Proficiency in innovation, new product development and commercialization
• Knowledge of and experience employing design thinking and lean start-up principles
• Experience fostering customer co-creation and/or customer experience platforms

Equal Opportunity Employer, including Disability/Vet