Food Safety and Thermal Processing Consultant

🔥 Food Safety Meets Smart Kitchen Tech — Short-Term Consulting Opportunity 🔥

Food Safety & Thermal Processing Consultant (Contract)
Remote | Flexible Schedule | 10–40 Hours | Potential for Ongoing Advisory Work

CHEF iQ (the connected kitchen brand from Chefman) is building something genuinely new: a smart cooking feature that uses real-time temperature data and cumulative lethality modeling to tell home cooks, with real science behind it, when their chicken, beef, or pork has actually hit safe-to-eat targets. Not a single magic number. Real time-temperature science, done right.

We've got the product vision. What we need now is you: a food scientist or food microbiologist who can look at our math and tell us where we're right, where we're wrong, and where we need a disclaimer before this ever reaches a customer's kitchen.

What you'd actually be doing:

• Sanity-checking our cumulative lethality and time-temperature models against real science
• Telling us what log reduction targets actually make sense for poultry, beef, and pork (ground and intact)
• Digging into our D-values, z-values, and whether carryover cooking can legitimately count toward safety
• Reviewing the exact words we want to put in front of customers ("Safe to Eat," "Pasteurized," etc.) and making sure we're not writing checks the science can't cash
• Helping us figure out what's ready for launch, and what needs more work first

You'd be a great fit if you:

• Have an advanced degree in Food Science, Food Microbiology, Meat Science, or Thermal Processing
• Know USDA-FSIS Appendix A and FDA Food Code like the back of your hand
• Can talk Salmonella and E. coli lethality kinetics without blinking
• Have real HACCP experience and understand meat/poultry manufacturing
• Can translate dense food science into language a home cook (and our legal team) will actually understand
• Have done consulting or product advisory work before, and know how to give a straight, evidence-based recommendation

The deal:
Short-term, remote, flexible. We're talking 10 to 40 hours total, on your schedule, with real potential to keep working together if it's a good fit on both sides.

If you've ever wanted to help make sure "done" and "actually safe" mean the same thing on a home cook's dinner table, we'd love to hear from you.

📩 Interested? Reach out to [contact info] with your background and availability.