Food jobs from The Focus Management Group of Companies

Technical Manager vacancy for a fast moving progressive chilled food business. In this position, you will play a pivotal role in helping to develop and lead the quality strategy within the business. This will focus on delivering consumer and customer satisfaction and business improvement. The role covers the effective management of supplier raw material assurance, new product development from innovation to manufacture and technical standards.

As a key member of the senior management team it is important you can influence and gain their full commitment to drive continuous improvement initiatives whilst delivering improved quality, food safety and environmental conformance and complaint reduction on site.

Key responsibilities include:

1. The development and communication of the quality strategy and objectives within the business to deliver improved product quality.

2. To be the functional head for the site technical team provide leadership support to ensure the site achieves the required standards for ISO 9000, 2000 and ISO 14001 accreditation, laboratory accreditation, BRC approval and Food Safety/Customer Audits.

3. The development and agreement of business wide quality KPI's with the site team, which drive continuous improvement, and influence real issues, aimed at achieving consistent manufacture to specification.

4. To provide leadership support to ensure quality plans/KPI remain on track through regular review and corrective action.

5. To liaise with major retailers to develop quality plans and agree KPI's appropriate to their requirements.

6. To continually evaluate and implement improved standards of best practice and GMP throughout the technical function to ensure food safety and environmental compliance and gain competitive advantage through quality and reliability.

7. To work with product development and manufacturing teams to optimise the change management process ensuring that all factory introductions (NPD/cost savings etc) are designed and introduced to a tight specification and capable of consistent manufacture on the plant.

8. To provide advice to the business on all aspects of food safety and environmental legislation, labelling and risk management.

9. To Work with Purchasing and product development teams to develop a proactive supplier base capable of supplying consistently to specification.

10. Provide leadership support focused on driving costs out of the business whilst ensuring technical standards are maintained and improved upon.

11. Advise senior management on crisis management issues from a technical point of view ensuring that UPF has adequate response and product recall procedures in place to be able to manage a potentially serious incident with minimum loss of customer and consumer confidence

12. Keeps abreast of new ingredients, packaging and processing technologies which may have application within UPF and communicates any potential opportunities to the relevant people within the organisation.

To be considered you will have held and had experience of a similar level position in a high risk manufacturing environment. You will have positive relationships with the retailers you have had dealings with and will demonstrate a high level of personal maturity and confidence to lead a team. And demonstrate the personal belief, passion and commitment to bring excellence to this organisation.

Ref SRJ6489