In his role as the Business Development Director–Food for the Agricultural Utilization Research Institute, Jason Robinson works with food clients to develop their businesses to further the value added development of Minnesota’s agricultural products.
Prior to joining AURI, Jason spent 19 years in corporate research and development at a Fortune 500 food manufacturer, as a product and process developer across a number of food technologies (including ready to eat cereal, salty snacks, frozen dough, ice cream, tortillas, taco shells, and snack bars) for the U.S., Canada, and other global businesses in both the conventional and natural products sectors. Jason was recognized as a collaborative, technical business leader, and later led R&D teams in snack bars, fruit snacks, salty snacks, snack bars packaging, and meat snacks.
Jason also served as Chief Technical Officer of a small, entrepreneurial business built within the confines of the large CPG, which has shaped his passion and desire to provide the technical guidance necessary for any food company to be successful – a key tenet of the AURI mission.
Jason brings a wealth of knowledge and experience in the end to end new product development process, including product recipe and process development, product stability and shelf life management, cost reduction strategies, consumer-focused concept and idea development, process scale-up and commercialization, experiment design, sensory evaluation, quality systems evaluation and management, label development, and food safety compliance. Jason is also a Certified Scrum Master, experienced in guiding teams through the Agile Product Development process.
Jason is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin – Madison, with a degree in Chemical Engineering. He lives with his wife and 2 energetic sons in Maple Grove, MN, and enjys coaching his son’s basketball teams and brewing his own fermented kombucha tea recipe for the continued health of his family.
