Food Safety and Quality Compliance Lead in Watford

About McCain. At McCain, we're feeding the world: from French fries to smiles, we contribute to the important role food plays in people's lives. That's why we're dedicated to ensuring our core values - Family, Authentic, Trusted, and Quality - shine through every day. As a privately owned family company with over 60 years of experience, a presence in more than 160 countries, and a global team of 22,000 people, our values and culture are at the heart of everything we do. We believe that we can work together, along with our business and community partners, to bring sustainable growth and positive change today, tomorrow, and for generations to come.

Why join the McCain family. Your Life - we're here to help you fulfil your potential, flourish, and thrive in work and life. Your Success - work alongside passionate individuals who are committed to supporting your career ambitions, drive, and success. Your Impact - we want you to make a meaningful, lasting impact for you, for your colleagues, and for the business.

About the role. Within our Food Safety and Quality team, the purpose of this role is to manage the site's customer facing technical systems and documentation. To provide information to internal departments and customers. To contribute to the efficient running of the production facility, providing a troubleshooting service as required. Reporting into the Regional Technical Manager and supporting the site technical function by reviewing site standards against customers and rectifying any gaps, managing the internal audit system and implementing procedures to ensure that the compliance programs are effective in identifying, preventing, detecting and correcting non-compliance with applicable laws, regulations and relevant compliance standards.

Responsibilities.

• Responsibility for the management, review and risk assessment of the site internal audit management system and the associated recruitment.
• Key interface between the retailers on technical queries on a day-to-day basis and host in conjunction with the site team audits relating to the standards/COP's for each retailer.
• Establish and maintain effective working relationships with suppliers to McCain Regionally and leading supplier audits/visits to drive consistency and performance improvement.
• Manage the site's Quality management system - implementation of retailer and customer manufacturing standards and codes of practice including BRC, management of retailer score cards, alerts, requests and audit and visit reports.
• Ensure full implementation of retailer and customer codes of practice, guidelines and manufacturing standards.
• Produce benchmarking reports for all customers as requested and internal reports to the business as required.
• Management of retailer customer complaints management system and associated responses, trend analysis where required, root cause, corrective and preventive action.
• Create, organise and control documentation in the Food Safety & Quality Manual, ensuring compliance with company processes and procedures in relation to Food Safety and Quality.
• Be an integral member of the site Crisis Management Team, supporting the site in EWE's and traceability challenges.
• Manage and complete internal audits in line with quality, food safety and legal requirements.
• Compile audit reports, identify corrective actions and close out of non-conformances.
• Maintain all customer specification portals ensuring all information is up to date and accurate.
• Provide customers with technical information as required.
• Act as a key team member in hosting, presenting and providing information during third party audits and internal assessments.
• Own corrective action tracker for the QMS and external audits/visits to drive continuous improvement.
• Review and interrogate all site Technical KPI's on a weekly basis, analyse trends, investigate any KPI failures/trends, communicate to site.
• Ensure all required reports are completed on time, in full and accurately for customers and other stakeholders.
• Working in partnership with operations teams, drive adherence to Technical/Operational/Customer Standards within operational area of responsibility.

Requirements.

• Knowledge: External standards - BRC, customer & legal requirements (Essential), Knowledge of HACCP (Essential), Auditing and exposure to external auditors (Essential), Knowledge of Quality & FS systems (Essential), Technical knowledge of products, materials and site (Desirable).
• Experience: Strong private label experience along with M&S audit and compliance expertise. Ability to work autonomously and use initiative, whilst being part of a team. Ability to influence and challenge. (Essential) Experience in a similar role with sound technical knowledge of technical requirements and Quality & Food safety you have needed to fulfil key performance indicators, working under pressure and to tight deadlines. (Essential) Experience of adopting a flexible approach to meet the needs of the business and the customer. (Desirable)
• Skills: Collaboration (Essential), Influence (Essential), Continuous improvement mind-set (Essential), Resilience (Essential), Flexibility - flow to the work and prioritise (Essential), Willingness to challenge existing working practices to continually drive improvement in Quality & Food Safety (Desirable), Ability to drive improvement at all levels (Desirable).

Location. You'll be based at our Whittlesey plant in Peterborough. With about 400 employees on site, we're one of our largest plants across the GB business. Our Whittlesey plant is where we make our famous French Fries as well as our chilled products, such as our Shake Shake Fries.

The benefits of working for McCain. Although we do encourage you to taste the goods you'll be pleased to know we don't pay you in 'chips'. For working hard, you'll also get a great salary and some pretty good benefits including:

• An excellent pension where we will pay double what you do, up to a maximum of 12% of your pay.
• Flexible holidays - where you can buy & sell up to 5 days holiday per year.
• Optional health cash plan.
• Cycle to work scheme.
• 'Chips In' Volunteering Day Off - to make a positive impact to the competitiveness, resilience, and long-term development of McCain communities across the globe.

We have an ambitious 5-year growth plan that presents development & progression opportunities for those who seek it out.

McCain Foods is an equal opportunity employer. As a global family-owned company, we strive to be the employer of choice in the diverse communities around the world in which we live and work. We recognize that inclusion drives our creativity, resilience, and success and makes our business stronger. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, religion, color, national origin, sex, age, veteran status, disability, or any other protected characteristic under applicable law.

McCain is an accessible employer. If you require an accommodation throughout the recruitment process (including alternate formats of materials or accessible meeting rooms), please let us know and we will work with you to find appropriate solutions.