Kerry Adamowicz

• Innovation & Consumer Insight: Supporting the Head of R&D – Natural Sweetness in driving an insight‑led innovation pipeline. Translating consumer and category insights into clear briefs and leading the development of recipes and prototypes that meet shopper and retailer needs.
• Bakery & Sweet Innovation: Develop fruit, caramel, chocolate and sweet bakery bulk fillings for doughnuts, cakes, pastries and other sweet baked goods. Lead recipe development from concept through prototype creation, optimisation, factory validation and commercial launch.
• Retailer & Supplier Collaboration: Working closely with major retailers (M&S, Tesco, Morrisons, Lidl) to shape and refine product concepts. Building strong relationships with third‑party manufacturers, raw material suppliers, and packaging partners to introduce new technologies, ingredients, and efficient packaging solutions.
• Specifications, Artwork & Compliance: Partnering with the Specifications team and using customer systems to update and approve product specifications and artwork, ensuring accuracy, compliance, and alignment with recipe or process changes.
• Cross‑Functional Delivery & Scale‑Up: Collaborating with Marketing, Category R&D, Quality, Supply Chain, and Commercial teams to progress projects through gate processes. Working with the Process team to transition products from bench to factory, supporting trials, troubleshooting issues, and contributing to continuous improvement.
• Technical Expertise & Continuous Improvement: Building strong technical knowledge of Natural Sweetness systems and site capabilities to identify innovation and optimisation opportunities. Supporting cost‑efficiency projects through recipe, material, and process improvements.
• Documentation & Risk Management: Maintaining clear project documentation, communicating risks early, and ensuring stakeholders are aligned throughout development. Enabling efficient retrieval of information and fostered knowledge sharing.

• Customer Engagement: Build and maintain strong relationships through regular interactions, effective communication, timely issue resolution and active participation in meetings to address product-related concerns and project deadlines.
• Quality and Specifications Management: Manage and maintain specification systems and QA documentation, ensuring technical data accuracy, compliance with regulatory standards and seamless uploads to supplier systems.
• Product Labelling and Artwork: Create, review, and ensure product labels and artwork comply with regulatory requirements, customer specifications and brand guidelines.
• Stakeholder Coordination: Collaborate with internal departments—including commercial, innovations, technical teams, and site QA—to ensure smooth operations and effective alignment.
• Innovation and Launch Support: Partner with Innovations and Operations teams to oversee product commercialisation, ensuring formulation accuracy and successful launches.

Responsibilities:

• Platform Support: Developing and commercialising annual campaign launches and productivity initiatives within the beverage category, including coffee and non-coffee product (tea, chocolate, frappes, refreshers, etc.). Resulting in 2023/24 sales in excess of £23m over 7 new SKU's.
• Consumer Insights: Translating core consumer insights and concepts into detailed product briefs, leading the technical development and commercialisation of hot and cold beverage innovations.
• Project Ownership: Managing seasonal and limited-time offer (LTO) activities, as well as productivity initiatives.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Participating in a cross-functional product team to deliver development plans through the Gate process.
• Stakeholder Engagement: Collaborating with project stakeholders to understand, define, and meet project requirements.
• Prototype Development: Leading the development and evaluation of product prototypes in line with briefs and gating requirements.
• Innovation Leadership: Creating, leading, and driving customer-led, commercially viable innovation concepts from ideation through to briefing, launch, and post-implementation.
• SOP Creation: Developing standard operating procedures (SOPs) for Costa Baristas.
• Global Integration: Identifying and integrating globally relevant product ideas, ingredients, and technologies to shape the innovation pipeline.
• Team Collaboration: Leveraging internal and external teams to deliver and build broader Costa product development initiatives.
• Risk Management: Managing project risks and communicate effectively to gain stakeholder collaboration.
• Documentation: Maintaining comprehensive documentation of research activities and findings.
• Cost Efficiency: Redeveloping products, materials and ways of working to improve cost efficiency.

• Product Development: Developed a range of products from snack seasonings to coatings systems for multinational accounts.
• Flavour Expertise: Broad knowledge of flavour technology across savoury and sweet applications including bakery, sauces, beverage, dry recipe mixes and confectionery.
• Customer Briefs: Successfully delivered against customer briefs to launch new products to market. Understands brief timelines, restraints and customer expectations.
• Material & Cost Management: Recognised raw material issues, CCI initiatives and develops accordingly. Can identify cost saving initiatives.
• Innovation: Identified new technologies and trends to get the job done.
• Product Knowledge: Demonstrated outstanding product and process knowledge to deliver right first time for customers.
• Problem Solving: Explored and created new ways to resolve problems with processes, technology or team members to improve overall efficiency.
• Relationship Building: Good working relationships with both internal and external customers both nationally and globally.
• Communication: Prepared a range of written communications, documents, reports and presentations for customers and colleagues using Microsoft Office, PowerPoint, and Teams.
• Customer Engagement: Confidently engages with customers to better understand needs and deliver against project targets.
• Business Acumen: Understands business strategy and commercial requirements.
• Supplier Interaction: Interacts with suppliers and trade associations to ensure up-to-date ingredients and technologies are adopted in new developments.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Able to work in a cross-functional environment including regulatory, procurement, QA and production.
• Sensory Team Support: Support for Sensory team.