Pastry & Puddings Development Chef
Location: Ilminster - Somerset
Hours: Monday to Friday 7.45am – 4pm
Pay rate: £55,000 - £60,000 depending on experience
Purpose
To collaboratively lead the development process for our puddings range — bringing technical skill, care and creativity to recipes that are generous, balanced and built to work beautifully from development kitchen to production.
This is a skilled development kitchen role for an experienced chef or NPD manager with a strong grounding in puddings, baking and pastry. Working closely with the Food team and Development Chefs, to create briefs you’ll take ownership of cooking, creating, refining dessert recipes — from sponges, crumbles puddings to pastry cases, custards, creams, sauces and chilled RTE desserts. You’ll contribute ideas, problem‑solve technically and operationally, and help ensure puddings deliver on flavour, texture and consistency at scale, without losing their handmade feel.
Alongside cooking, you’ll help maintain the smooth running of the development kitchen and uphold COOK’s high standards for quality, organisation and food safety.
What you’ll be doing
Collaborate with food team on product briefs that deliver the right products for customer and COOK.
Confidently execute a wide range of dessert techniques including sponge mixing, pastry making, blind baking, custards, creams, sauces, compotes and set desserts and use this knowledge to refine the briefs.
Support the development and refinement of recipes through tasting, iteration and technical adjustment (texture, structure, bake, sweetness, balance).
Lead and scale the recipes with the puddings team to ensure the products deliver on taste as well as yield and commercials.
Prepare and submit all samples for the gated sign off process.
* Work with the puddings kitchen team to optimise the production process and improve margins, ensuring repeatability and robustness of the recipes
* Lead EPD projects across our existing range
Development Kitchen & Collaboration
Working with Development Chefs the wider Food Team & Puddings team to deliver new pudding ideas on time and to brief.
Collect, label and manage raw material samples and finished pudding samples for sign‑off, photography, shelf‑life and nutritional testing.
Contribute ideas and solutions during development discussions, bringing practical pastry and dessert knowledge to the table.
Food Safety, Quality & Organisation
* Maintain excellent standards of food safety, hygiene and allergen control at all times.
* Keep the development kitchen clean, organised and calm, setting a strong example in day‑to‑day working practices. Manage ingredient stock and sample storage carefully, ensuring correct labelling, dating and FIFO. Support freezer and sample management to ensure clarity and traceability.
* Ensure all scale up trials are completed in full through tastings, yields and labour timings.
Learning, Growth & Craft
* Continue to develop technical pastry and pudding skills, keeping curiosity and care at the heart of your cooking.
* Build a strong understanding of COOK recipe standards, ingredient sourcing and quality expectations.
* Take and give feedback constructively, supporting a collaborative and thoughtful development culture.
If you tick most of these boxes but not all—don’t stress. We’re all about potential.
What Cook is About
We’re a proudly independent, family‑owned B Corp, which basically means we care. A lot. About our food. About our people. And about doing the right thing—even when it’s not the easy thing.
Other bits
* Excellent Benefits including
* paid breaks
* free food
* CookieJar
* Smart Spending discounts on leading brands
* profit share
* 30% staff discount
* birthdays off and much more
Our vision for COOK has always been that we are a place where EVERYONE is welcome. We want everyone to feel like they belong at COOK. We all have different roles, different abilities and different personalities. By collaborating we can do remarkable things. Whatever your story, if you would like to grow with COOK please apply.
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