About the Role
The Operations Manager will lead the day-to-day cookie dough production operations, ensuring safe, high-quality, on-time, and cost-effective manufacturing. This role drives operational performance, food and human safety, quality assurance, maintenance coordination, and team engagement.
Key Activities
Safety Leadership: Establish and maintain a strong safety culture focused on human and food safety. Model safe behaviours, conduct regular safety assessments, and drive continuous improvement in incident prevention and corrective actions.
Production Management: Plan, schedule, and execute production targets for dough production lines; ensure adherence to recipes/formulations, yields, and quality specifications; manage line changeovers, line uptime, and changeovers with minimal disruption.
Food Safety & Quality: Implement and uphold HACCP and SQF-based controls; ensure GMP compliance; champion first-pass quality and corrective actions to prevent non-conformances.
Process Excellence: Identify and eliminate bottlenecks, reduce variability, improve yields, and maximise Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) across production lines; lead root cause analyses for deviations and drive effective corrective actions.
Compliance & Traceability: Ensure compliance with all applicable regulatory, state/federal, and industry standards; maintain proper documentation, recordkeeping, and batch traceability.
Continuous Improvement: Lead and participate in kaizen events; deploy Lean/Six Sigma practices as applicable; translate data into actionable improvements and measurable KPIs.
Capex & Maintenance Collaboration: Partner with the Maintenance Manager on asset care, preventive maintenance, and capital projects to support reliable production performance.
Cost & Performance Management: Track and control labour, material usage, waste, and controllable expenses; manage cost-to-serve, yield dollars to budget, and downtime impact.
Preferred Skills
Experience in analysing downtime, variance, and yield data; ability to drive data-driven improvements
Basic budgeting, forecasting, and KPI management experience.
Excellent communication skills; ability to present to all levels, from the shop floor to executive leaders.
Education and Experience
5–7 years of hands-on experience in food manufacturing with increasing leadership responsibilities; prior P&L exposure preferred or demonstrated budget ownership.
Strong knowledge of HACCP, with prior hands-on experience in food safety systems; SQF experience desirable.
Bachelor’s degree in Engineering, Food Science, Operations Management, or related field.
About Us
Finding a great opportunity that fosters growth, a great culture, and leadership opportunities can be difficult. Top Quality Recruitment (TQR) connects professionals with leadership opportunities across the Packaging, Food and Beverage, Medical Devices, and Biotechnology industries. With 50+ years of experience, we believe in one-to-one communication and finding the best candidate/employer match possible.
TQR is an equal-opportunity employer that encourages diversity. We will consider all applications.
Accommodation for applicants with disabilities is available upon request.
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