Jen Kimmel
Head of R&D – Americas
Innovating from the Science Bench to the Leadership Table
As a self-described “science nerd,” Jen Kimmel enjoys laboratory work and running experiments. With over 20 years in the food industry and working at Roquette since 2018, Jen was on a technical career path. However, that changed in 2023 when she became Head of Research & Development (R&D) for the Americas. Jen credits people investing and having confidence in her to take a leadership role she never expected.
While she values playing a larger part in leading strategic decision-making, Jen hasn’t moved away from science and experiments since she oversees the R&D team at our innovation center in Geneva, Illinois, USA. They support our manufacturing colleagues, production plants, and customers through troubleshooting issues or finding ways to be more efficient.
Jen and her team are highly involved in innovating and creating new plant-based ingredients. They contributed to a recent breakthrough, NUTRALYS® Pea S855F pea protein isolate, by listening to a customer’s needs and partnering on a pea protein taste improvement project for the customer’s plant-based beverages. Our R&D team screened ideas with the customer’s input at the Geneva pilot plant, scaled it up at our demo plant in France, and commercialized the new ingredient at our manufacturing site in Canada.
Drawing on her expertise in plant protein, Jen has had the opportunity to talk at food industry events like Future Food-Tech San Francisco 2026. She presented about how Roquette can support consumers on GLP-1 medication with our nutrient-dense plant-based ingredients that offer nutritional health benefits.
We put our purpose into action by being transparent and using very clean processes to make our ingredients. We can trace where our raw materials come from to ensure we produce safe, high-quality ingredients. This is not only important for our customers but also important for consumers of the end-products that contain our ingredients.
The food industry also led Jen to become an avid gardener.
A few years ago, she successfully grew some peas from our Canadian site, which kickstarted her enjoyment of growing vegetables and flowers. She spends a lot of her time in the garden when the weather is nice, and she brings extra seedlings to work to share with colleagues.
In her current leadership position, Jen has found how effective it is to work cross-functionally and appreciates other perspectives to enrich the output of her work.