Senior Technical Manager

In this critical role you will be part of a highly regarded site leadership team, reporting to the General Manager, leading, coaching, and developing the site quality team of approximately 15 colleagues (covering Implementations / Laboratory / Factory Quality). You will be making a significant contribution to taking the site forward, driving forward the quality agenda, leading new product implementations improvements, and maintaining and improving audit results.

In addition, you will be a senior member of the Refresco UK technical team with a dotted reporting line into our Head of Technical for Refresco UK, contributing to strategic plans and developments, and in time covering for the Head of Technical when required.

Senior Technical Manager - Refresco, Bridgwater, Somerset (just off J23 of the M5)

Benefits:
• Competitive salary
• 15% annual bonus
• Family private healthcare
• 8% pension
• X4 life assurance
• £7000 Car allowance
• 27 days + bank holidays, plus the option to buy additional days.

Refresco Bridgwater is one of the largest and most modern food & drinks manufacturing sites globally - 158,000 square metres, 4 factories, a large warehouse, and transport facility under one roof, some of the latest leading-edge engineering technology enabling us to produce 800 million litres per annum of soft drinks for our many own label and contract manufacturing customers from 26 production lines. We also have ongoing investment in many CAPEX engineering projects.

Find out more about our site at Bridgwater by viewing this short video: Bridgwater Site Video

About the Role

As Senior Site Quality Manager, you will act as a role model for all colleagues for the implementation of our quality agenda at Bridgwater, responsible for the delivery and improvement of site technical and quality performance matrices and standards, complying with legal, group, and customer requirements and working closely with the site team to ensure that all aspects are performed in line with standards.

Here are some of your key responsibilities:

1. Ensure the site is safe, legally compliant, meeting all internal and external standards including delivering excellent audit results from a food safety perspective.
2. Lead your site quality team, developing, coaching, and empowering them to take them from 'good to great'.
3. Lead the site quality agenda, engaging all colleagues in quality, increasing their knowledge of processes and best practices.
4. Ensure your team works in close collaboration with the central Product Development team.
5. Act as the lead and 'guardian' of BRC, HACCP, auditing, product launch, and retailer codes of practice.
6. Build great relationships and communication with external customer food technical and quality teams.
7. Ensure due diligence can be demonstrated to satisfy the requirements of external agencies.
8. Effective value engineering implementation via active change control and operational support on technical matters and innovative technologies.
9. Report internal Refresco KPIs to the site management team.
10. Ensure quality monitoring and testing systems including micro and food safety are in place.
11. Lead the site customer complaints process.
12. Lead the product/packaging implementation technologists and operational teams to ensure that the launch and trial of new products is completed in a timely manner, meeting food safety, legal, and customer requirements, and that process changes are evaluated, risk assessed, validated, and documented.

About You

If you match this profile we would like to hear from you:

1. You will need experience of leading and developing a factory quality team communicating a clear vision, via coaching and empowering your team.
2. You will need to be a strong communicator at all levels including being able to present information and transfer information articulately at a senior level.
3. You will need FMCG industry sector experience preferably in food and/or drink (dairy liquid processing experience would be excellent!) in which you have become familiar with factory operations.
4. A degree in a Science or Food Technology is preferred or 5+ years industry experience in a similar technical/quality role.
5. In-depth knowledge of BRC and HACCP standards and plenty of experience of internal and external audits.
6. You will need to be fully familiar with modern manufacturing methodologies, and show that you have delivered new product implementations and have a successful internal/external customer audit record.
7. You will have experience and feel comfortable in a fast-moving, fast-changing 24/7 manufacturing environment with many SKUs, new product implementations, and new automated engineering equipment.
8. You have high professional standards, work collaboratively with colleagues, you are a good communicator at all levels, and you have excellent attention to detail with top analytical skills.

About Refresco

Refresco is the global independent beverage solutions provider for Global, National, and Emerging brands, and retailers with production in Europe, North America, and Australia. Refresco offers an extensive range of product and packaging combinations from juices to carbonated soft drinks and mineral waters in carton, PET, Aseptic PET, cans, and glass. Refresco continuously searches for new and alternative ways to improve the quality of its products and packaging combinations in line with consumer and customer demand, environmental responsibilities, and market demand.

Refresco is headquartered in Rotterdam, the Netherlands and has more than 13,500 employees. www.refresco.com.

Our drinks on every table. That's the Refresco vision. We’re a global business and currently produce 12 billion litres of soft drinks from 64 manufacturing plants in 12 countries and we’re only just getting started.

We’re the proud owners of six drinks manufacturing sites within the UK. Our UK business provides a great place to work for over 1,800 employees, who produce private label soft drinks and fruit juices for all the leading retailers.

Whether it’s packed in cartons, bottles, or cans, we ensure that our products are made to the highest quality standards. Our products get where they need to be when they need to get there to meet the needs of our high-profile customers.

#LI-GK1 Senior Quality Manager – Senior Technical Manager – Senior Technical Lead