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.