Ingredients Manager

We are looking for an experienced food professional to step into a high-impact role at an important point in apetito’s growth. This is an opportunity to shape how we optimise, manage and introduce ingredients across the business, delivering real commercial, operational and quality benefits while supporting our expansion into our new Kitchen West production facility.

For the first 12-18 months, the role will be embedded in a focused project team, identifying and driving opportunities to improve value, reduce complexity and deliver measurable business benefit without compromising the quality of our food. This will be a demanding, fast-moving phase requiring pace, resilience, strong judgement and the ability to turn opportunity into action.

As the project outputs are embedded, the focus of the role will transition into a broader Ingredients Manager remit within the development team. You will lead the introduction and management of raw materials, take line management responsibility for our Food Technologists and NPD Raw Material and Change Control Co-ordinator, and continue to strengthen the way we deliver food technology, specifications and change control support across the business.

This role is practical, delivery-focused and hands-on, requiring technical expertise, commercial awareness, project management discipline and the confidence to work through ambiguity. You will evaluate ingredients and materials, work closely with suppliers and internal teams, conduct trials, challenge existing ways of working and drive opportunities through to successful implementation.

The role offers significant scope to make a visible difference: simplifying processes, unlocking value, improving consistency, supporting innovation and helping build stronger, more sustainable ways of working for the future. To succeed, you will need a proven track record of delivering cross-functional projects within food manufacturing, balancing cost, complexity, quality and risk in a commercially thoughtful way.

Highly organised, energetic and results-focused, you will be able to build structure around complex work, prioritise the opportunities that matter most and translate ideas into measurable, sustainable business benefits.

This is a fast-paced, challenging role with business-wide influence and genuine opportunity to bring about lasting change. It will require hard work, pace and determination, but for the right person it offers the chance to help shape how apetito operates and contribute directly to our future success.

This role is based at our UK Head Office in Trowbridge Wiltshire.

apetito is the UK’s leading food supplier to the health and social care sectors serving more than 1,300 care homes, health care and education settings.

Our meals are expertly crafted by our dieticians and chefs, and then frozen to lock in the goodness.

Wiltshire Farm Foods, our sister company, is the UK’s largest ready meal supplier cooking and delivering over 330 different delicious frozen ready meals across the UK.

• Seek and enact a high-impact programme of ingredient, raw material, packaging and finished product opportunities, unlocking measurable benefits in cost, quality, consistency, operational performance and customer proposition.
• Work in close partnership with Procurement, suppliers, project teams and cross-functional stakeholders to spot opportunities, shape solutions and turn technically and commercially viable ideas into action.
• Build and manage a clear, energised opportunity pipeline, bringing structure to complex work through defined benefits, plans, timings, dependencies, risks, resource needs and governance.
• Challenge unnecessary cost, complexity, duplication and over-specification, creating space…