Manager, Operational Excellence & Industrial Engineering

Manager, Operational Excellence & Industrial Engineering

Cranford, NJ

is a self-funded, profitable, rapidly growing multi-channel DTC specialty food and wellness company with over 550 people on our team. We're changing the landscape of snacking on nuts, dried fruit, chocolate and more! We planted our roots in Newark, New Jersey during the Great Depression, selling premium nuts on Mulberry Street's open-air market. We've come quite a long way since then, taking our multi-generational family business online in 1999.

Even after 97 years, we continue to pride ourselves in expertly sourcing the highest quality foods and treating our customers like family.

The role

The Manager of Operational Excellence & Industrial Engineering will be a hands-on, high-impact operator responsible for improving how work gets done across our operations network. This person will lead continuous improvement, industrial engineering, and network efficiency initiatives that improve productivity (labor margin), quality, and customer experience. They will also help us build the plant of the future by identifying where automation, robotics, data, and process technology can improve how our operations work today while shaping the long-term technology roadmap for scalable growth.

This role is ideal for someone who is analytical, practical, self-motivated, and comfortable moving between data, the production floor, and executive-level conversations. We are looking for someone who can identify problems, build the business case, align stakeholders, and then roll up their sleeves to execute. The right candidate will not just report on performance; they will improve it. They will lead projects across process design, labor standards, packaging optimization, network design, Perfect Order Score improvement, root cause analysis, SMED, New Product Innovation support, and other ad hoc special operations projects.

This person will partner closely with Operations, Data, Engineering, FSQA, and cross-functional leaders to drive measurable results across the business. This role reports to the Director of Operations.

How you'll make an impact

Lead initiatives that improve network-wide efficiency, cost structure, and operational execution across production, fulfillment, packaging, receiving, inventory, and related workflows.

• Analyze and improve cost to produce, labor margin, productivity, throughput, yield, waste, and operational cost drivers across the network.
• Identify opportunities to reduce labor cost per unit, improve units per labor hour, and increase overall operating leverage.
• Build and maintain clear views of operating performance across sites, departments, lines, shifts, and processes.
• Partner with Operations leadership to prioritize the highest-impact opportunities and translate them into executable projects.
• Support network design decisions, including process flow, labor model, equipment utilization, packaging flow, space constraints, and operational scalability.
• Develop financial models and business cases that quantify expected savings, ROI, payback, and post-implementation impact.
• Lead or co-lead weekly meetings focused on operating costs, productivity, labor performance, Perfect Order Score, project progress, and improvement priorities.

Bring a practical industrial engineering mindset to how we design, measure, and improve work.

• Conduct time studies, labor analyses, workflow observations, and process mapping to identify improvement opportunities.
• Develop and refine labor standards, staffing assumptions, job designs, and productivity expectations.
• Identify opportunities for job combination, line balancing, layout improvement, work simplification, and standard work.
• Improve process flow across receiving, roasting, filling, packaging, fulfillment, inventory, and other operational areas.
• Use Lean, Six Sigma, Kaizen, RCA, SMED, and other continuous improvement methods to solve problems and reduce operational friction.
• Partner with frontline operators and supervisors to test, validate, and sustain process improvements.
• Partner with cross-functional teams on product…