Customer Relation Manager EMEA

About the role

The Customer Relations Manager Europe is the Quality & Food Safety interface between Barry Callebaut and its key customers, ensuring alignment between customer expectations and the company’s global FSQR standards and operational capabilities. In this role, he/she drives consistent implementation of customer quality requirements across BC sites and functions.

This role is critical in building long-term customer trust and relationships by enabling customer solutions in collaboration with CI&TS, commercial teams, and supply chain and by handling and reducing quality complaints effectively.

Within BC, the Customer Relations Manager is an important partner for the customer documentation team, guiding them in handling customer queries by providing customer insights and technical expertise related to products, processes and certifications.

The position also serves as backup to the Customer Value Director, Europe, contributing to regional customer value strategy, issue management and customer relationship governance.

Key responsibilities include

Customer Partnership & Business growth

• Act as the primary Q&FS partner for assigned Global/Regional customer accounts.  Manage their expectations, ensure alignment with BC’s quality, food safety, regulatory and operational policies.
• Lead regular customer meetings on quality performance , reviewing performance metrics, trends, risks and opportunities, projects and collaboration .
• Drive growth by representing Q&FS during customer projects, innovation initiatives and technical discussions in close cooperation with Commercial, CI&TS, and regulatory teams.

Technical expertise, complaint and issue management

• Oversee the handling of complaints and quality issues for assigned accounts, ensuring timely resolution and clear, meaningful feedback.
• Work closely with local quality teams supporting root cause analyses and effective resolution of complex quality matters by providing product, process and customer knowledge.
• Be a key-player in cross-functional issue management, by bringing the customer perspective, ensuring aligned, timely and appropriate communication with the customer.
• Participate in customer audits on request and support sites in preparing and demonstrating compliance

Documentation Expertise

• Provide strong support to the Customer Documentation / Case Management Team, helping them respond accurately and efficiently to customer queries.
• Translate customer requirements into clear guidance for teams handling documentation, certificates, and compliance profiles.
• Ensure customer specifications are validated, correctly interpreted and aligned across sites.

Internal Alignment & Continuous Improvement

• Act as the primary Q&FS contact for assigned accounts, ensuring clear communication of customer expectations.
• Communicate customer requirements to internal stakeholders including certification needs, finished product requirements and regulatory constraints.
• Driving alignment across sites and functions at regional and corporate level to ensure consistent service levels for key accounts
• Share trends on specification compliance and identify opportunities for standardization and  continuous improvement.

Backup Responsibilities

• Serve as the quality backup for the Regional Customer Value Director Europe for customer‑related topics and issue management.

About you

• Bachelor’s or Master’s Degree in Food Science / Food Technology or equivalent
• Experience in Quality Assurance, ideally within food, feed or pharma environment
• Practical experience with audits, certifications and customer quality documentation
• Strong communication skills and the ability to translate technical concepts for non‑technical audiences
• Fluent English (other European languages an advantage)
• Willingness to travel for customer meetings, audits and internal collaboration

• Experience working with quality systems in a manufacturing environment within food or related industries
• Strong experience handling customer documentation, specifications, certificates, and similar technical quality materials
• Practical experience with complaint management, root cause analysis and structured problem solving
• Experience working with multi‑stakeholder, international teams
• Ability to support both customer-facing interactions and hands-on technical tasks internally

The ideal candidate is a proactive and detail-oriented professional with a strong understanding of business continuity and crisis management principles. They should be able to work effectively across different departments and levels of the organization.

• Is customer-focused yet pragmatic, able to balance customer needs with operational realities
• Communicates clearly and builds trust with customers and internal teams
• Enjoys hands-on technical work and supporting documentation and case management tasks
• Works in a structured and detail‑oriented way
• Handles complexity with a calm, solution-oriented mindset
• Is collaborative, team-focused and able to influence without authority
• Is comfortable switching between strategic customer discussions and detailed technical support