Job Description

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We are looking for a quality leader for our Northampton site, who will harness collaborative working practice with all departments, strive to achieve the highest possible quality and food safety standards and deliver a gold standard service to our customers and brands. In this role, you will motivate your team and peers to maintain quality management systems and compliance that meet all legislative requirements and customers' code of practice (COP). The Northampton site is the largest manufacturing site across SHS Food, with the largest operations team, the highest number of products, customers, and audit standards. This is an opportunity to lead the way in best practice across the Division.

Key Responsibilities/Duties

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Lead the QA team at Northampton, developing the team's skills and implementing smart working practices. Own the quality management system specific to the Northampton factory site. (This includes all relevant areas such as HACCP, TACCP, allergen management, pre-requisite programmes, internal audits, and non-conformance management.) Build best practice systems with quality managers across SHS Food. Adopt a safety-first mindset, both in food safety and health & safety. Have an in-depth knowledge of the relevant customer code of practice, and confidently lead customer audits with the site team. Effectively manage and communicate quality issues to customers and stakeholders, using root cause analysis, with clear and timely communication to customers. Monitor and trend customer complaints, build robust improvement programmes to show decreases year on year. Own joint action plans with customers to improve product quality. Support the NPD team to achieve flawless new product launches by assessing technical feasibility of recipes, attending first production runs with customers and ensuring necessary quality preparation is taken for new launches. Trending of KPIs with the factory manager to build annual quality improvement plans and build a food safety and quality culture.

Experience/Qualifications

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HACCP level 3. TACCP trained. Food Science degree. Internal Auditor training. 3-6 years of experience in a Food Quality discipline. Line management experience. Direct customer working, ideally with retailers. Incident management (ideally on withdrawals/recalls), using root cause analysis and communication techniques. Decision making and communication - able to analyse data for a situation and make clear decisions, or present data for decision making in a clear format. * Always looking for new ways to improve systems or make processes more efficient to save time, or improve their own ways of working.