Overview: The Plant Manager is responsible for leading the development of a culture that emphasizes excellence and a passion for winning while leveraging people and processes to deliver world-class performance in Safety, Quality, Delivery, and Cost. This role involves ensuring strict adherence to Food Safety and Quality requirements, optimizing daily production operations, and maximizing the efficiency and quality of equipment, materials, and staffing resources.

Major Job Functions:

Safety & Compliance:

Ensure team member safety by enforcing health and safety policies and protocols and continuously promoting a safety culture.

Proactively identify and resolve safety issues or potential concerns.

Operations Strategy & Performance:

Lead the development, execution, and monitoring of the operations strategy to achieve performance, quality, and safety improvements while ensuring the achievement of manufacturing goals.

Accountable for plant-level production costs, labor utilization, yield results, safety performance, turnover, and On-Time In-Full (OTIF) delivery.

Food Safety & Quality Assurance:

Ensure adherence to Food Safety requirements and Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP), including meeting audit targets.

Maintain strict quality control and customer specifications on a daily basis.

Continuous Improvement:

Use available data (e.g., OEE, line speed targets, efficiency) to continuously improve productivity, uptime, and reliability.

Develop and implement continuous improvement initiatives to enhance plant performance.

Capital Improvement & Budgeting:

Develop, recommend, and implement capital improvements for the plant, including preparing and executing the capital plant budget.

Customer Service & Coordination:

Ensure the synchronization of processes and activities across all functional areas to meet customer service level targets, from demand planning to delivery.

Employee Leadership & Development:

Continuously coach, direct, and train employees using Lean principles.

Monitor employees' performance, attitude, and conduct formal reviews as required.

Support the training and development of employees to maximize safety, quality, and productivity.

Compliance & Governance:

Ensure all plant personnel comply with plant and corporate procedures, as well as all customer and governmental regulations.

Collaboration Across Functions:

Coordinate manufacturing activities with other functions and suppliers to optimize production and utilization of human resources, machinery, and equipment.

Required Skills/Abilities/Education:

Education: Bachelor's degree in food science, manufacturing, engineering, operations management, or a related field.

Experience: Minimum 5 years of manufacturing experience in a senior plant leadership role.

Industry Experience: Experience in the manufacturing, processing, or packaging industry, specifically within food production.

Skills:

Results-driven with a strong desire to grow and learn in a fast-paced environment.

Strong project management skills and the ability to manage numerous people, processes, and resources.

In-depth knowledge of GMPs, OTIF, and other core food manufacturing practices.