Job Description

About Methodology

Methodology is a food and wellness brand that delivers clean, nourishing meals weekly to our clients. We’re on a mission to empower people to heal their bodies and minds through food as medicine. Our vision is to create the most thoughtful, delicious, and creative at-home dining experience possible. Our menus tell stories that connect food with nutrition, lifestyle, culture, travel, and seasonal trends. We’re building a brand that improves lives through intentional eating and are looking for people who are driven, curious, and passionate about food, health, and hospitality.

Overall Mission of This Role

We’re looking for a highly experienced and creative R&D and Menu Design Chef to lead Methodology’s culinary innovation. This person will own the development of weekly rotating menus and new menu drops, translating brand strategy into high-impact meals that meet nutritional, visual, and operational targets.

This role bridges fine dining-level creativity with large-scale production thinking. You’ll design dishes that elevate the at-home experience while remaining executable by our culinary team using semi-automated processes. You’ll collaborate cross-functionally with marketing, sourcing, operations, and culinary leads, and will report directly to our Culinary Operations Manager.

To succeed in this role, you must have strong culinary judgment, the ability to scale recipes with and without test batches, and the operational mindset to create production-ready formulas with precision. You should be energized by fast-moving product development cycles, deeply detail-oriented, and passionate about guest experience and food storytelling.

While this role is highly creative and collaborative, it also requires a balance of strategic planning and hands-on involvement. You can expect to spend approximately 70% of your time behind a computer designing and documenting menus, developing and refining recipes, and collaborating with cross-functional teams, while the remaining 30% will be spent in your kitchen and/or ours—testing and adjusting new recipes, plating and weighing components, and demonstrating recipes to our team (in our kitchen in Concord) to ensure consistency and accuracy.

Who You Are

• 5+ years of experience in a fine dining setting
• 5+ years of experience cooking and developing recipes within a high-volume or catering environment
• 5+ years of experience cooking and developing recipes for combi ovens and tilt skillets
• 5+ years of pastry experience is preferred
• 3+ years of gluten-free, dairy-free, refined sugar-free R&D / cooking experience
• 3+ years of developing recipes for contract-manufacturing preferred
• Proven expertise in recipe design with a strong portfolio from a fine dining or high-end catering environment
• Proven ability to review existing recipes and accurately adapt them for our kitchen, at times without having to do any physical recipe testing
• High attention to detail in writing and documenting every step of a recipe so they can be executed at the same quality levels, flavor, and visual consistency every time
• Passionate about health, wellness, and nutrition, with health as a priority in your life
• Excited to design recipes that are optimally nourishing and macros optimized without sacrificing flavor or aesthetics 
• Highly in-tune with social media trends, empowering you to create menu concepts and presentations that resonate with current audiences and drive engagement across digital platforms.
• Expertly knowledgeable about techniques, science, and numbers behind cooking so you can instantly recognize when a recipe needs correcting in order to work properly and taste amazing
• Attentive to any issues in our menus or operations and has the initiative to flag these proactively, ensuring continuous improvement and excellence in our service delivery.
• Tech and finance savvy with advanced experience with Google Spreadsheets - pivot tables / data aggregation, customizable reports, vlookup/hlookup, filter, query, calculating profit margins, creating recipe costing sheets
• You collaborate and communicate respectfully, clearly, and thoughtfully with your teammates, including those you report to, those at your level, and those who report to you. 
• Team-oriented mindset, focused on overall business success
• Patient, generous, and humble attitude towards all team members
• Proven ability to thrive in a fully remote work environment

What You'll Do

You will design our weekly changing menus in spreadsheets that include every detail required for every recipe that week. You take full ownership of this to ensure the menu is accurate, profitable, executable, and drives revenue and retention.

Your weekly menus must, every week:

• Hit nutrition targets for Standard and Large meal variations, including target calorie, protein, fiber, fat, and carbohydrate ranges;
• Refrain from including any "illegal" ingredients into recipes such as seed oils, gluten, and dairy;
• Include at least 1 new meal or snack every 1-2 weeks so our customers don’t get bored;
• Include accurate photos (plated and in its packaging) of any new or revised meals;
• Include accurate recipes, weights, portioning instructions, and packaging for every component of every meal;
• Be published accurately and on time every week, at least 4 weeks in advance of its delivery date;
• Empower us to hit our weekly labor and food spend targets;
• Clearly define the concept and visual presentation of each menu item, detailing the story, the overall flavor profile, each component, and exactly how components will be plated in a jar or bento, including how the item will be heated then plated by guests.
• Ensure that the design of your menu items looks beautiful both when packaged in the jar or bento and when guests plate the final menu item at home.
• Accurately scale recipes with instructions any chef in our kitchen could read and follow successfully.
• Provide the culinary admin team with all the details needed for each menu item to be input into our proprietary software system, including the exact weight of each component in grams once packaged (in all meal sizes), detailed recipes with instructions and weights of each ingredient in grams, plating instructions and photos for exactly how the menu item should look in the jar or bento, heating instructions for our guests, and more.
• Provide the marketing team with the story behind your menu items so they can properly share it with our guests.
• Collaborate and/or take the lead on sourcing and purchasing teams to ensure that all ingredients and packaging you include are available at scale at the time the menu item will be live on the menu.
• You will have an administrative assistant able to do data entry for our menus into our software system day-to-day, though you are expected to master our software inside out so you are able to make changes on your own or look up info you need as well.
• Create one new full recipe (every component needed for the meal or snack) every two weeks to ensure it is accurate and ready to be used on a menu. The recipe must meet all nutritional requirements, exclude illegal ingredients, and be profitable and feasible for execution.
• Meet with CEO and/or COO at least once every two weeks to review R&D pipeline so it’s clear what menu items we are adding and why. You should expect that most menu ideas will come from the marketing team, and from there you will perfect and flesh them out before R&D to ensure they elevate the brand while hitting all financial and operational constraints.
• Correct all existing recipes by catching mistakes before they go live and by getting lists of mistakes on a daily basis from chefs in the kitchen. Ensure these recipes are accurate the next time they appear on the menu.

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