Growing the team: food scientists and formulation experts

UnSugar is growing. We are adding people across food science, formulation and applications, process engineering, and commercial roles, and the reason is simple: more customers want help cutting sugar, and every project needs hands that understand both the ingredient and the food it goes into. This is a note about the work, the mix of skills we are after, and the people we hope will read the careers page and reach out.

Why does an ingredient company need more than chemists?

It is tempting to think a sweet protein sells itself. UnSugar Sweet Protein is about 500 to 2,000 times sweeter than sugar by weight, and in most reduced-sugar foods our formulators start near the top of that range and adjust by taste, so a few milligrams do the work of grams. On paper that sounds like the whole story. In practice, potency is only the starting point.

A high-intensity sweetener replaces sweetness and nothing else. Sugar does a lot of quiet work in a recipe. It adds bulk, creates the browning that gives baked goods their crust and color, lowers the freezing point of ice cream, feeds yeast in dough, holds water so products stay good on the shelf, and gives candy and baked goods their structure. Pull the sugar out and all of that leaves with it. A customer who swaps in the sweet protein and expects the old recipe to hold together needs someone to help rebuild the parts sugar used to carry.

That someone is our team. A sweet protein is only useful if a customer can actually formulate with it, which is why applications and technical support sit at the center of the company rather than off to the side.

What does the team help customers do?

The day-to-day is specific, and it is the part of the job we find most interesting.

• Dialing in sweetness. The right dose in a sparkling water is not the right dose in a yogurt. Getting there means bench trials, sensory panels, and careful notes. A common starting point is a blend that takes about 65% of the sweetness from the sweet protein and 35% from the customer's existing sweetener.
• Rounding out off-notes. Stevia and monk fruit carry a bitter, licorice-like linger that many people notice. A clean sweet protein in the blend smooths that out, and figuring out the combination is real formulation work.
• Rebuilding what sugar did. For a deep cut, we help customers pair the sweet protein with bulking agents, fibers, or allulose so texture and mouthfeel survive, plus rice flour or corn starch and a longer, cooler bake where a crisp snap matters.
• Hitting cost and nutrition targets. Every project has a budget and a label goal, and part of the job is finding the formulation that lands taste, cost per unit, and the nutrition panel at once.

None of this is generic. A functional protein powder behaves differently from a chocolate bar, which behaves differently from a soda. Beverages and dairy tend to be about sensory work. Confectionery and bakery tend to be about bulk. The more applications scientists we have, the more customer projects we can take on at the same time.

How do the skills fit together?

We need a range of backgrounds, and they lean on each other.

Food scientists and formulation experts own the customer-facing bench work, turning a brief into a recipe that holds up. Fermentation and process engineers keep the upstream side sound, because the ingredient a customer formulates with has to be consistent batch to batch. UnSugar Sweet Protein is, and getting that process to run cleanly and reproducibly is its own discipline. Commercial roles connect the two, sitting with customers to understand what they need and making sure the technical team is solving the right problem.

The through-line is that the science and the customer sit close together. New team members join a bench where the people running the process and the people sitting with customers talk every week.

What kind of people do we want?

We are after three traits more than any specific line on a resume.

Curious, because sugar reduction is not a solved problem and the interesting answers come from people who keep asking why a formulation misbehaves. Rigorous, because food work rewards careful method and honest data, and an ingredient company lives or dies on whether its claims hold up. And customer-obsessed, because the whole point of the team is to make a customer's product better, not to admire our own ingredient.

"The best formulation people I have worked with treat a customer's problem as their own. They do not stop at 'the sweetener works.' They stop when the whole product tastes right," says a member of the UnSugar applications team.

If you read the list of daily problems above and felt curious rather than daunted, that is the signal we look for.

Common questions

What roles are open right now? We are hiring across four areas: food science and formulation, applications and technical support, process engineering, and commercial roles. The careers page has the current openings. If your background sits between categories, that is fine; a lot of the best work here does too.

Do I need experience with sweet proteins specifically? No. Very few people do, since the category is young. What helps is real food-formulation experience, comfort at the bench, and a willingness to learn how the sweet protein behaves. We will teach the ingredient.

What does UnSugar actually sell? UnSugar Sweet Protein, the kind of sweetness found in fruit, a plant-based sweetness that helps reduce sugar, in food and beverage. Because the body digests it as a protein and it delivers sweetness at milligram doses, it contributes no sugars and negligible calories. Our team helps customers formulate with it so their finished products taste the way they should.

If food science careers, formulation jobs, and helping shape a sweet protein company sound like where you want to spend your time, head to the UnSugar careers page and see what is open. And if you want to see the ingredient our team works with, Request Samples or review the technical data sheet.