Danone Global Research & Innovation Center located in the Utrecht Science Park in the Netherlands is a state-of-the-art Life Science innovation center for the development of new product concepts for Specialized Nutrition. We create formulas that provide clinically substantiated health benefits to vulnerable consumers – infants, toddlers, elderly and patients.   

We are looking for a senior data manager / Data Scientist in the User Experience team to translate our sensory & consumer data into applications for product experience design and, more broadly, business strategy. This new position is a great opportunity for someone wishing to join a dynamic community, in the User Experience department of Danone Nutricia Research in Utrecht. Our dynamic UX community, with more than 100 collaborators across the world, has for main mission to embody the user voice to inspire and co-design awesome food experiences that people will adopt. We work in a multi-disciplinary business environment, to understand consumer’s behaviours and expectations and design Products and Packaging. We partner with leading-edge scientists and agencies to build a competitive advantage for Danone.   

Your Role  

As a senior data manager, you will use your strong business acumen & expertise in Data analytics/ Data Science within the Specialised Nutrition (SN) User Experience (UX) team to provide industry-leading data solutions to understand and explain users’ perceptions and to direct product development. You will also use your industry experience and your ability to translate data insights to business strategy.  Your mission is to:  

1. Drive the digitalization roadmap for UX SN, in line with category knowledge building and strategy plans:   

• • Co-build the UX data roadmap to feed the business needs and work together with other data science teams, data architecture and IT teams to get these implemented in Danone.  
  • Pilot new UX initiatives exploring new and advanced data science techniques (e.g., AI, LLM, data/text mining).  
  • Create a data culture within UX SN and coordinate, train & animate the UX SN community to use the UX database, predictive models etc.   

2. Inspire and fuel product innovations through big learnings generated from sensory & consumer data:   

• • Support the statistical data analyses for UX studies (preference mapping, meta-analysis, predictive modeling) to provide insights in collaboration with sensory & consumer design managers and/or agencies. 
  • Review and convert generated results into insights and recommendations and communicate these findings in understandable presentations to various stakeholders and via dashboards. 
  • Design preference mapping studies through experimental designs and be able to combine sensory & consumer data analysis for predictive modelling for long-term insights for the various product categories  
  • Capitalize on existing models and co-build new predictive models together with externals partners, to better leverage our UX data and link them with data from other disciplines e.g., product development, physical measurements etc.   

3. Manage the Data management team and external partners  

• • Develop one direct report, with the possibility that the team expands in the future to include student interns or other internal or external employees. 

In this role you will interface with multi-disciplinary teams and key capabilities in Research & Innovation (R&I).  Given this, you should bring extensive experience in data management and analysis and, as a bonus, experience in sensory and consumer design.  You must also bring a passion for our categories and specifically for bringing the consumer/patient voice into the business to engage and influence key business partners.  

• Master’s degree or equivalent in Food Science, Sensory/Sensometrics, Data Science, Statistics, or related fields with at least 5 years of industry experience. 
• Strong business acumen with industry experience in using data analytics as an application to business strategy
• Analysis and Interpretation - advanced understanding of basic and multivariate statistics to analyse sensory & consumer data (e.g., preference mapping, segmentation, etc.). 
• Experience writing and speaking about technical concepts to business, technical, and high-level audiences and giving understandable data-driven presentations.   
• As a bonus: Sensory Expertise - knowledge and experience in a range of sensory & consumer methods, especially quantitative studies. And Experience with sensory data collection software, such as EyeQuestion, Compusense etc. 
• Proficiency in programming language, preferably in R or Python. 
• Experience with data analytics software, such as XLstat, JMP. 
• Experienced in visualization tools (PowerBi, Shiny etc.). 
• Intellectual curiosity for problem-solving using data science modeling techniques and passion for keeping up to date with current methodological developments.   
• Fluent in English; and international experience is a bonus.  
• Purpose-driven person, who wants to contribute to Danone’s Mission to positively impact health.