Suppliers Quality and Food Safety Manager

Job Title: Suppliers Quality and Food Safety Manager

Location: Etobicoke, ON

About Us:

Welcome to Lactalis Canada! We’re proud to be Canada’s #1 branded dairy company and to be consistently recognized as one of the country’s top employers by Forbes. Our purpose is to enrich and nurture the lives of Canadians by offering the best of dairy from Canada’s favourite dairy brands like Cracker Barrel, Black Diamond, Balderson, Astro and Lactantia. In fact, our products can be found in over 90% of Canadian refrigerators in any given time.

As part of Lactalis Group, the world’s leading dairy company, we remain focused on innovation and quality and are seeking like-minded individuals to join us as we continue our growth journey. Our flexible hybrid work model accommodates 40% remote work, adapting to the evolving needs of our workforce. Step into a collaborative hub with our revamped office, and enjoy free parking, endless coffee, delicious Lactalis snacks, an on-site gym, and more!

About the opportunity:

The Supplier Quality and Food Safety Manager drives the ingredients, packaging materials and supplier selection and validation quality programs, manages Supplier’s performance improvement through a collaborative approach, ensures that the ingredients and packaging material delivered every day comply with Lactalis requirements and value to customers and consumers, and promotes the Culture of Quality within the Procurement organization through the QFS long-term plan (LTP) execution.

The attributes we are looking for:

• Creates, implements, and maintains workflows, standardized documents, reviews, KPIs, and communication plan.
• Creates and implements “no spec no buy” and “no spec no prod” ways of working.
• Works with IT to identify and implement the relevant digital tools supporting that process.
• Represents the Quality and Food Safety team in procurement meetings when relevant.
• Trains the key stakeholders in the new processes
• In collaboration with the food safety team, monitors emerging risks, including food fraud, on ingredients and packaging materials, and informs relevant stakeholders (R&D, Legal, Procurement…)
• Collects Quality and Food Safety-related information from a potential supplier, performs a risk assessment and evaluates the Supplier’s capability to meet LACTALIS requirements.
• Collaborates with Procurement and the potential Supplier to address the identified gaps and performs an audit, if necessary,
• Be a key advisor to the Supplier and Brands+Leadership team so they understand weaknesses, deficiencies, challenges of our supplier portfolio and partner with leaders/suppliers to address any gaps from start to finish.
• Checks supplier site/line capability to provide compliant materials sustainably, assesses with the Food Safety team the need to implement a monitoring plan (i.e. on allergens, chemicals…)
• Decides whether a mitigation plan is sufficient to move into the approval phase and approves the new Supplier when risks are assessed “under control”.
• After Lactalis factory validation (vs HACCP, conditions of utilization, safety…), approves a material (ingredient or packaging) for industrial trial accordingly to finish product application, with all risks under controls or mitigation plan with acceptance of remaining risks.
• Supports R&D and Manufacturing teams during the industrial trial phase and co-builds with R&D and the Supplier the Individual material specification as a standard for the time this material will be used by LACTALIS.
• Defines the need and conditions of “at-reception” testing by the factory.
• Monitors, through KPIs, dashboards and trend analysis, Quality and food safety compliance of ingredients and packaging materials to the individual material specification.
• Communicates compliance results to relevant stakeholders and engages action plans when needed.
• Performs compliance and performance reviews with suppliers regularly.
• Supports factories and suppliers on non-compliance or incident management, provides expertise on root cause analysis and problem-solving methodology.
• Supports productivity or variability reduction projects.
• Drives the implementation of incident/withdrawal/recall-related procedures with…