Technical Manager (food industry)

Up to £85,000 plus company car and benefits.

If you're a concrete technical manager in one of the big groups, you already know what this advert needs to overcome. You know what it takes to get a new mix design approved. You know what it feels like to be asked to take just a little more out of a specification to hit a margin target. You know how long it takes to push a customer technical issue through the system. You know how many meetings it takes to get a budget signed off for a piece of kit you could justify on the back of an envelope. You know that your best ideas have been sitting in a drawer for longer than you'd care to admit. This role is built for the person who's done with that.

The business is a privately-owned, financially strong construction materials business with operations across the UK. The board is hands-on. They are in the building, they are in the conversations, and they are the ones making decisions. This is the structure you will be working inside, and it is the single most important thing to understand about the role. You will report directly to the board. That means no regional layer between you and the people who set direction. When you have a view on a product, a customer, a standard, or a piece of investment, you put it in front of the people who can act on it. There is no waiting list. There is no committee. There is no business case to write before you get permission to think about something. That structure is rare in this industry, and it is the reason this role exists in the form that it does.

In most large construction materials groups, the daily pressure on a technical manager is to push specifications to the edge of compliance and eke the last bit of margin out of every cubic metre of material. The job becomes a constant negotiation between technical integrity and commercial pressure. This business does not work that way. The business deliberately over-engineers its products. It is a conscious decision, driven by the conviction that long-term reputation is built on the quality of what leaves the plant, not on shaving margin out of specification. That position is sustainable because the business is privately owned and free of the shareholder pressure to extract every last penny from every product. For a concrete technical manager, that changes the nature of the job. Your instincts on quality are not in tension with the commercial direction of the business. They are aligned with it. You are not the brake on margin. You are the reason customers come back.

You will be the technical authority on concrete and related products. The job spec lists everything you'd expect: Factory Production Control, Certificates of design and compliance, Technical support to commercial, Customer-facing problem solving, Lab oversight, Team development. All of it is in the role. What the spec does not tell you is what is genuinely on offer: The scope to set the technical direction without going through three layers of management to do it. The room to develop and trial new product options on a timescale that reflects the opportunity, not the process. The authority to make calls on customer technical issues directly, in real time, without escalation. The latitude to build out the technical capability of the team in the way you think it should be built. The visibility at board level for the work you do, and the credit that goes with it.

Three kinds of people will read this advert and recognise themselves in it: The experienced concrete technical manager in a major group who is tired of operating inside a matrix and wants to be the person whose name is on the work; The senior technical professional who has the gravitas to step into a role like this but has never been given the opportunity by their current employer, because the structure above them has not made room for it; The incumbent in a similar role at a competitor business who is doing well, is paid well, but knows they have stopped being challenged and is ready for something with more meaning to it.

What we want in the candidate is straightforward: Deep technical credibility in concrete, a career to back it up, a recognised technical qualification (ICT Diploma in Concrete Technology, an industry degree, or equivalent), and the personal range to operate from plant floor to boardroom without changing register.

Package: Up to £85,000 base salary, negotiable for the right person, Company car, Plus benefits. The business deliberately invests in strong base salaries rather than variable, bonus-led packages. That decision reflects how the business runs. Long-term, stable, focused on retention of the right people rather than churn on the back of short-term incentives.

To apply: This is a confidential search. Apply through this advert or contact me directly for a conversation. If you are currently employed in a similar role and want to understand what this looks like in practice before deciding whether to take it further, that conversation is exactly what I am here for.