Quality Assurance Manager

About the job

The Quality manager is accountable to ensure compliance, alignment and adequacy of the policies and procedures for Quality, Food Safety and Sanitation within the plant. Additionally, they will ensure requirements are met and exceeded for Regulatory standards, Barry Callebaut Policies, GFSI and customer requirements.

Main responsibilities include:

• Develop their team and build capability within the plant to ensure high performance across all Quality, Food Safety and Hygiene metrics;
• Manage audits, visits and inspections from Customers, Certification bodies, Regulatory agencies or corporate oversite at the plant;
• Oversee the corrective and preventative (CAPA) actions coming from internal or external audits, and the plant daily management system;
• Provide support to resolve customer complaints, complete RCA cycles and ensure CAPA efficiency;
• Lead food safety, ensure the food safety plan is properly implemented and complied with;
• Work closely with the operations team, R&D and sales to support effective and efficient new product or site to site product transfers;
• Establish and document standards for sanitation procedures while ensuring compliance;
• Oversee local laboratory equipment and quality control material supply inventories;
• Ensure appropriate, timely decisions on destination response for possible non-conformities or Quality/Food Safety issues;
• Drive corrective actions for out of spec materials, performing RCA to identify the source and ensure no recurrence;
• Establish a balanced scorecard with leading and lagging indicators to provide visibility of plant performance at all org levels;
• Lead the issue management team (integrate, train and coordinate) according to Global guidelines;
• Ensure the plant Document Management System (DMS) is used effectively and maintained with up-to-date control documents;
• Ensure product labels are regularly reviewed and approved for quality and compliance;
• Ensure product batches are released to customers only once operations, QC and compliance reviews are completed;
• Continuously develop a quality improvement plan as part of site masterplan to bring the plant to highest performance;
• Identify food safety investments and CAPEX requirements to comply with standards and improve food safety performance;
• Lead food defense and vulnerability assessments and develop plans for the site;
• Manage QA team planning:  budget and capex (short, medium and long term).

About you

• Master’s degree in chemistry, Biology, Microbiology or Food Science or equivalent (or engineering degree with 7 plus years in food quality assurance);
• 5+ years’ experience in food safety, including formal HACCP training;
• Minimum local language fluency plus English (B2);
• Knowledgeable in MS Office Suite, SAP Systems and other applications;
• Strong knowledge of food safety systems;
• Proven people management skills;
• Understanding of processing and processing technologies - food or pharma industry preferred;
• Change Manager seeking Continuous Improvement through people capabilities development;
• Strong interpersonel and communication skills;
• Good problem-solving abilities.