Job Summary
Lead quality and ripening operations, managing ripening plans, stock decisions, and shopfloor issues while driving KPI performance, team execution, and continuous improvement.
Essential Duties & Responsibilities
- Manage day-to-day quality functions across inloading, ripening.
- Execute and monitor ripening regimes, ensuring plans are followed and deviations escalated appropriately.
- Make informed quality decisions on stock usage, rotation, and waste to maximise returns while maintaining compliance.
- Capture and record quality performance data at intake and operational level, identifying emerging issues and trends.
- Provide hands-on leadership, supervision, and mentoring of the Ripening team, ensuring daily tasks are clearly understood and completed.
- Allocate daily resources effectively to meet operational and technical priorities.
- Act as the first point of escalation for shopfloor quality issues, resolving where possible and escalating when required.
- Assist with technical and ripening trials, ensuring accurate execution and data collection. Manage shelf-life performance and support benchmarking activities by ensuring accurate data capture and sample handling.
- Feed operational insights and performance data into the Quality Manager to support reporting, KPI tracking, and improvement plans.
- Identify practical improvement opportunities on the shopfloor and support their implementation.
- Work closely with Production, Technical, and Quality teams to ensure alignment between plans and execution.
- Lead daily KPI reviews on the shopfloor, ensuring performance against defined KPIs is clearly communicated and understood.
Minimum Qualifications & Requirements
- Minimum 4 years of prior work experience in a Fresh Produce Technical/Quality function.
- Highly proficient in Microsoft Office applications, particularly Excel, with the ability to troubleshoot issues, develop new and adapt existing spreadsheets.
- Ideally, an understanding of Microsoft D365.
- ERP implementation skills.
- Able to work and make decisions with a sense of urgency, adhering to tight schedules and simultaneously managing several projects.
- Some leadership with the ability to be hands-on, work independently, and remain self-motivated.
- Able to understand the company’s organizational structure, operating philosophy, culture and lines of responsibility, authority, and communication in both the United Kingdom and United States operations.
- Proven ability to be result focused, metric driven, and translate priorities and actions into measurable results.
- Excellent problem-solving skills with a strong ability to effectively identify problems by framing issues, leveraging data, and developing and implementing solutions. JD Reference Number JD-QR-002 Version Number 1
- Customer service driven.
- Analytical: Strong ability to independently evaluate trends, explore areas for improvement, interpret large amounts of data, and provide possible solutions.
- Organization: Ability to stay focused on prioritized tasks, while handling emergency situations during times of high stress or heavy workload.
- Technical Skills: Assess own strengths and weaknesses, pursue training and development opportunities, strive to continuously build knowledge and skills, share expertise with others.
- Communication: Excellent communication skills, including an ability to adapt communication style to suit different audiences.
- Teamwork: Balance team and individual responsibilities for group efficiencies. Exhibit objectivity and openness to others’ views, able to work effectively with all levels of management to obtain team objectives.
- Quality: Must demonstrate accuracy, thoroughness, and commitment to complete tasks correctly the first time.
Pay: £38,000.00 per year
Benefits:
- Company pension
- Free parking
- On-site parking
Ability to commute/relocate:
- Dartford DA2 6QB: reliably commute or plan to relocate before starting work (required)
Experience:
- fresh produce: 4 years (required)
Work authorisation:
- United Kingdom (required)
Work Location: In person
