Coated Fish Products Improvement Technologist

Hilton Foods Seachill (Seachill) and the University of Lincoln have been successful in winning a government grant through the Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) scheme administered and managed by Innovate UK. This has created an exciting and innovative partnership opportunity between Seachill and the National Centre for Food Manufacturing in the College of Science at the University of Lincoln.

A satellite campus of the University of Lincoln, The National Centre for Food Manufacturing (NCFM) is an essential resource for the UK’s food industry with over 250 major companies accessing courses, technical services and research. Our clients include the major national and global food manufacturing businesses and leading supermarkets, and we collaborate with many international partners and universities. The NCFM has recently established a satellite laboratory and office in Grimsby on Europarc. Together these facilities offer outstanding sector-focused facilities, including a state-of-the-art food factory demonstrating cutting edge food automation.

We are looking to recruit a Food Science graduate (ideally MSc or PhD qualification) with some practical experience in the food industry and experience of performing scientific and technological investigations to evaluate and optimise food processing. The successful candidate will have academic and/or practical knowledge in food science, chemistry, biochemistry, engineering or related subjects.

The KTP Associate will drive and lead a two-year project which aims to develop and embed an innovative, science-led optimisation framework initially targeting improvements in fishcake production.

The KTP Associate will be based mainly at the Seachill Estate Road 2 site in Grimsby and will be subject to Seachill’s employment practices and conditions of work. The National Centre of Food Manufacturing Grimsby office is less than 1 mile away from Hilton Foods Seachill’s Laforey site and 2 miles from its Estate Rd 2 site.

• Designing a food process optimisation framework that integrates food science principles and process engineering to enhance production efficiency, minimise waste, and improve product consistency.
• Initially developing the framework with robust data to identify optimisation opportunities.
• Addressing technical and operational challenges
• Using process mapping and science-based data analysis to optimise process control and ingredient interactions
• Applying food process science expertise to assess physical, chemical, and sensory attributes of products to map existing product performance and improvements
• Designing a food process optimisation framework that integrates food science principles and process engineering to enhance production efficiency and reduce waste
• To identify and evaluate emerging fish and food processing techniques
• To manage the development and implementation of the optimisation framework with flexibility to adapt it according to changing business priorities and operational constraints
• Tracking progress against clearly defined project and business objectives
• To identify risks and implement risk mitigation strategies
• Building a communication plan to embed the framework and ensure it is owned by the Seachill team for ongoing improvements
• Understanding the business complexity, objectives and constraints
• Demonstrate the commercial benefits as part of the evaluation
• Identify the stakeholders that can influence the implementation of optimisation opportunities
• Develop training materials and complete training with the Seachill team