Quality Assurance Manager; Food Manufacturing

Overview

Tribute Baking Company is the strategic combination of five businesses with rich histories in the baking industry! Always Bagels, Original Bagel, Hometown Foods USA, Dutch Maid and Just Bagels, together, create a market leading producer of authentic New York style kettle-boiled, hearth-baked bagels and high-quality cake products sold into the in-store bakery, club store, food service, and convenience store channels. Reporting to the VP Plant Manager, the Quality Assurance (QA) Manager is responsible for developing, implementing, and managing integrated food safety and quality systems while directing cross-functional teams in sanitation, quality control, and food safety.

The QA Manager serves as the primary guardian of product integrity within the bakery, tasked with identifying and controlling hazards at every production stage while maintaining strict adherence to local, national, and international food safety regulations including HACCP frameworks, FSMA requirements, and GFSI standards. This is an on-site position at our Medley, FL location.

• Has governance responsibility of ensuring compliance with food safety, regulatory, and internal standards and is authorized to take appropriate action to ensure compliance with these standards.
• Responsible for ensuring customer/consumer safety/satisfaction.
• Make timely decisions to support production up to 24hrs a day, 7 days/week.
• Demonstrate strong leadership of the food safety and quality agenda at the plant, serve as a change manager to drive improvements in programs, processes, and culture.
• Oversee all aspects of the food safety and quality systems including the quality and Sanitation manuals.
• Establish programs, procedures, techniques, and systems to ensure product conformance to company and government specifications/standards and customer satisfaction.
• Participate in ongoing training to stay current with industry trends in FSQA programs.
• Implement robust quality management systems, including appropriate statistical process capability/control, food safety/sanitation/GMP/HACCP, structured team problem solving.
• Prepare sampling plans for ingredients, finished products and other materials to gather samples, perform analyses, and take appropriate actions based upon the test results.
• Conduct inspections and compliance audits in support of the FSQA standards.
• Ensure sufficient FSQA/sanitation staffing and competence to execute the responsibilities of the quality/sanitation function. Ensure complete and accurate records and that the documentation is maintained, including formula integrity.
• Lead and facilitate the plant customer complaint investigation and resolution process, institutionalize corrective actions.
• Effectively lead efforts regarding quality related incidents or issues. Manage communications and develop action plans and contingency plants for escalating consumer, customer, supplier, or company incidents.
• Establish a quality culture along with the leadership team to ensure quality is proactively built in, engage all employees in quality & food safety strategies and facilitate an audit-ready environment.
• Work with the company's regulatory compliance manager to maintain labelling/nutrition information compliance of the plant for the US and international markets the facility delivers to.
• Collect, read, compile, utilize and synthesize ideas and methods from existing literature, experts, files, trade events, and publications to provide recommendations for potential cost savings initiatives, and process improvements.
• Ensure plant food safety and quality interests in the transition of products from R&D pilot initiatives to commercial manufacturing status (e.g., in-process control points).
• Supervise all associates directly assigned to the quality, food safety and sanitation departments and work closely with associates in the production, packaging, logistics, maintenance, the human resource departments, and the executives.
• Prepare the facility for its annual GFSI audit (BRCs).
• Lead the GFSI audit (BRCs).
• Train new employees on the FSQA and quality control procedures and conduct employee training through Alchemy- the facility's training platform.
• Coa…