Senior Manager, Food Safety & Quality

At Russell Stover, not only do we love chocolate, but we love our jobs! Every day we go to work exhibiting our values of excellence, innovation, entrepreneurship, responsibility, and collaboration. Working at Russell Stover you’ll be part of the leading manufacturer of boxed, seasonal, and sugar-free chocolates. For over 100 years, Russell Stover Chocolates, Whitman’s, and Pangburn’s have been crafted with the finest ingredients to bring happiness to generations.

Today, we produce over 55 million pounds of chocolate annually, and our legacy brands can be found in 13 company-owned stores and over 9,000 wholesale accounts. Join our team and let’s continue making chocolate lovers happy!

As our Senior Manager, Food Safety & Quality, you will lead and develop Russell Stover’s Food Safety & Quality team by implementing policies, procedures, and best practices across our manufacturing facilities. You will serve as the company’s subject matter expert in food safety and quality systems, including microbiology, sanitation, FSMA, HACCP, GFSI, allergen management, SPC, and related programs.

In this role, you will be a self-motivated and accountable leader who fosters collaboration across meetings, projects, and the work environment. You will partner with stakeholders at all levels of the organization, building strong relationships and driving a culture of food safety and quality excellence throughout the business.

You will provide leadership and direction to the Food Safety & Quality Assurance (FSQA) Managers at each manufacturing site, along with their site-based FSQ teams. Russell Stover’s manufacturing facilities are located in Iola, Kansas;
Abilene, Kansas; and Corsicana, Texas, and you will work closely with teams across all locations to ensure alignment and consistency in food safety and quality standards.

This position reports directly to the Senior Director of Food Safety & Quality.

• Monitor significant food safety and quality risks, performance gaps and corrective actions, ensuring effective execution, follow-through and appropriate escalation.
• Provide executive reporting on Food Safety, Quality and Regulatory compliance including scorecards and KPIs.
• Partner with cross-functional departments (e.g., Regulatory, Supplier Quality and Procurement, R&D, Operations, Engineering) to drive improvements and ensure effective execution of preventive controls, food safety, quality, and regulatory compliance programs.
• Partner with cross-functional departments (e.g., Innovation, Marketing, R&D, Operations) where quality standards for products need to be set and procedures for non-conformances are established.
• Lead and oversee audit readiness and corrective action responses across assigned facilities for regulatory, third-party certification, and internal audits, ensuring effective resolution of findings and timely implementation of corrective actions.
• Oversee the microbiological testing program, including interpreting results and providing actionable recommendations. Partnering with plant sanitation on SSOPs, cleaning verification activities and establishing line release protocols.
• Lead team to establish quality systems including food safety plans, HACCP, audit readiness, CAPA governance, track and trace, validation and verification programs, and quality food reviews.
• Lead, coach and develop FSQA personnel while strengthening food safety and quality culture, capability and accountability across the assigned plant teams.
• Will lead and instruct the plant FSQA teams to interface and maintain the use of digital data collection systems and other formats, such as but not limited to, Trace Gains, SAP, and other similar systems.
• Demonstrates the ability to strategically analyze…