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Flavour Craft
We treat flavour as a craft. Our team has the bench time, the tools and the support to do real formulation work, and to keep learning at every step of a brief.
Careers
The work ends up
in what people eat.
Send us your CV. A flavourist or applications lead at the Southport bench reads it within one business day. No agency, no contract, just a conversation about the work.
Read inside one business day. A conversation, not a contract.
Our Culture
Why people choose VKA Australia
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Working Together
The best flavours come out of close work between flavourists, applications, technical service and commercial. The bench talks to the customer, the customer talks to the bench. Everyone is in the room.
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Room to Grow
We back our people the way we back our work. Mentoring from senior flavourists, real learning across a five-decade flavour-science archive, and a clear path to take on more over time.
Experience
“Here, you don't just make flavours. You shape what people taste in the food and drink they buy every day.”
At VKA Australia you work alongside flavourists, applications scientists, technical service and commercial colleagues who genuinely care about the food and drink our customers make. Our Southport site is a working flavour house, with development benches, applications space and a production floor, all under one roof.
Knowledge moves freely here. Senior flavourists work with people earlier in their careers. The bench, technical service and the commercial team talk to each other every day. That close exchange is how briefs get sharper and how the work gets better.
Twenty-three years of Australian flavour craft in Queensland, with five decades of formulation and sensory work behind us. That depth sits behind every brief we take on, while the day-to-day work happens with an Australian team in Southport.
What we look for
People who care about the work, not the title.
We hire across disciplines, but the people who do well here share a few things. None of them are about a particular degree or a particular number of years on a CV.
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Curious about food and drink.
You notice how things taste. You read the label on a new soft drink at the petrol station. You think about why a sourdough crumb is different at one bakery than another. You don't have to be a flavourist to have this; you do have to have it.
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Honest about what you taste.
A flavour bench needs people who can disagree with the senior person in the room about a sample. Politely, with evidence, on the strip. The day a junior stops calling a bad sample bad is the day the work stops being good.
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Solid on the craft.
For flavour creation that means trained sensory work and clean lab technique. For applications, the kitchen and the rheology. For technical service, a real grip on what happens to a flavour in someone else's process. For commercial, an actual interest in what the customer is making. Different crafts, same standard.
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Open and direct.
We don't run by chain-of-command memos. The bench talks to the customer, the customer talks to the bench, the production floor talks to the brief. If you want a workplace where you can ask the senior flavourist a question across the bench, this is one.
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Australian roots, global mind.
Most of our work is for food and beverage makers shipping in Australia and New Zealand. You should care about that market, the way Australians actually eat and drink, and stay curious about everything moving elsewhere.
Life at the bench
How the work actually looks.
A few moments from a working week at the Southport site.
Sensory at the bench, every day.
The flavour bench is a quiet, focused space. Each flavourist works to their own strip, their own nose. You'll see two people side by side on the same brief without ever sharing a smelling strip. That is the technique, and it is what keeps the read clean.
Compounding to a four-decimal weighing.
Formulation work runs on a high-precision analytical balance and calibrated glass pipettes. Every brief leaves a trail, formulation notes in clay-bound notebooks, batch records that come back to the archive, an amber-bottle stock to draw from next time.
Field treks with growers.
Some weeks the work isn't at the bench. We visit lemon-myrtle plantations on the east coast, walk citrus groves with growers, sit through cocoa-pod sortings up north. If a sourcing question turns up, someone goes.
Opportunities
Where we hire, Southport, Queensland
VKA Australia hires across these disciplines when the right people come along. If your background fits one of them, send your CV through the Open Application below and we will be in touch when something opens up.
R&D
Flavour Creation
Flavourists, applications scientists and sensory roles working on briefs from Australian and New Zealand food and beverage makers at our Southport site.
QA
Quality & Regulatory
Quality, food-safety and regulatory roles, making sure every batch and every document meets what the brief and the market require.
Commercial
Commercial & Account Management
Account management and business development roles across Australia and New Zealand, sitting close to the technical work rather than apart from it.
Operations
Operations & Technical
Production, technical service and project roles at our Southport manufacturing and R&D site, keeping the day-to-day work running.
Open Application
Don't see your role? Send your CV anyway.
If you keep a tasting drawer in your fridge, or you've ever argued about kokumi over a beer at the pub, we'd like to hear from you. Send your CV and a note about what you'd want to work on. A flavourist or applications lead at the Southport bench reads it within one business day.
Goes to careers@vka.au. No agency, no contract. A conversation about the work.