Quality Manager – Food Manufacturing

Quality Manager – Food Manufacturing

Clean Label Gourmet Foods
Halethorpe, Maryland
Full-time | On-site

Salary: $100,000–$120,000 per year, based on relevant food-manufacturing, technical, and leadership experience.

Annual bonus: Target opportunity of 10% of base salary, with the potential to earn up to 15% for exceptional performance. Bonus results are based on audit performance, corrective-action effectiveness, food-safety performance, team development, and continuous improvement.

Benefits: Company-sponsored insurance benefits, 401(k) retirement plan, paid time off, and paid vacation.

About the opportunity

Clean Label Gourmet Foods is seeking an experienced, hands-on Quality Manager to lead food safety, quality assurance, regulatory compliance, sanitation oversight, and continuous improvement at our food-manufacturing facility in Halethorpe, Maryland.

This is a highly visible plant-leadership position. The successful candidate will be comfortable preparing for an SQF audit, reviewing food-safety records, coaching employees on the production floor, investigating deviations, working with USDA and FDA representatives, and partnering with Operations to solve problems without compromising food safety or quality.

Our manufacturing environment includes USDA- and FDA-regulated products, ready-to-eat and ready-to-cook foods, high-pressure processing, sanitation programs, allergen controls, supplier approval, and customer and third-party audit requirements.

Primary responsibilities

• Lead and continuously improve the facility’s food-safety and quality-management systems.
• Serve as the site’s SQF Practitioner or principal SQF leader.
• Lead certification, surveillance, customer, regulatory, and third-party audit preparation and corrective actions.
• Maintain and verify HACCP plans, food-safety plans, preventive controls, prerequisite programs, SOPs, SSOPs, and supporting records.
• Ensure compliance with applicable USDA FSIS, FDA, FSMA, SQF, customer, labeling, and product requirements.
• Oversee food-safety and quality controls for ready-to-eat and ready-to-cook products.
• Provide quality oversight for high-pressure processing, including validation support, verification, record review, deviation handling, and coordination with outside HPP providers when applicable.
• Lead environmental monitoring, pathogen-control, allergen-control, foreign-material, traceability, hold-and-release, and product-disposition programs.
• Partner with Sanitation and Operations to verify pre-operational conditions, sanitation effectiveness, hygienic zoning, chemical controls, and corrective actions.
• Manage supplier approval, supplier risk assessments, specifications, certificates of analysis, supplier performance, and corrective actions.
• Investigate deviations, nonconformances, complaints, environmental findings, regulatory observations, and other food-safety concerns.
• Lead root-cause analysis and corrective and preventive action, including verification that corrective actions remain effective.
• Maintain recall and crisis-management readiness and lead mock recalls and traceability exercises.
• Review process, sanitation, laboratory, and finished-product results and make appropriate hold, release, escalation, and disposition recommendations.
• Establish meaningful quality metrics and communicate risks, trends, and priorities to senior leadership.
• Recruit, train, coach, and hold accountable members of the Quality team.
• Provide food-safety and quality training to production and sanitation employees.
• Work closely with Operations, Sanitation, Maintenance, Procurement, Product Development, Warehousing, and senior leadership.
• Immediately escalate serious food-safety risks and exercise appropriate authority to place affected products or materials on hold.

Minimum qualifications

• Five or more years of progressively responsible food-safety or quality-assurance experience in food manufacturing.
• Experience in a USDA FSIS- or FDA-regulated food-manufacturing operation.
• Working experience with HACCP and FSMA preventive controls.
• Experience investigating deviations, performing root-cause analysis, and implementing corrective actions.
• Experience preparing for or participating in regulatory, customer, SQF, GFSI, or other third-party audits.
• Experience supervising employees or formally leading cross-functional teams.
• Strong written communication, recordkeeping, organization, and prioritization skills.
• Ability to work on-site in Halethorpe and provide reasonable schedule flexibility for production, sanitation, audits, and urgent food-safety matters.
• Ability to perform the position’s essential functions, with or without reasonable accommodation.

Preferred qualifications

• Current Preventive Controls Qualified Individual training.
• HACCP certification or recognized HACCP training.
• SQF Practitioner experience.
• Experience with ready-to-eat or ready-to-cook foods.
• Experience with high-pressure processing.
• Experience with sanitation verification, hygienic zoning, and environmental monitoring in an RTE facility.
• Experience with supplier approval, allergen management, specifications, traceability, recall exercises, and customer complaints.
• Bachelor’s degree in food science, microbiology, biology, chemistry, or a related discipline—or equivalent relevant experience.
• Internal-auditor, food-defense, or food-fraud training.
• Spanish-language skills are helpful but are not required.

First-year priorities

• Assess CLGF’s current food-safety and quality systems and develop a prioritized improvement plan.
• Strengthen SQF and regulatory audit readiness.
• Improve sanitation verification, environmental monitoring, corrective-action follow-through, and supplier controls.
• Develop the Quality team and increase production-floor ownership of food safety.
• Establish useful metrics that identify risks and prevent recurring problems.

Work environment

This position regularly works in an active food-manufacturing facility. The environment may include refrigerated areas, wet sanitation conditions, production machinery, protective clothing, and required personal protective equipment.

How to apply

Please submit your résumé and briefly address these questions:

• Which food-manufacturing regulations and certification schemes have you worked under?
• Describe a significant food-safety or quality problem you personally led from discovery through verified corrective action.
• What experience do you have with RTE/RTC foods, sanitation, environmental monitoring, SQF, or HPP?

Clean Label Gourmet Foods is an equal opportunity employer. Employment decisions are based on job-related qualifications, performance, and business needs. Reasonable accommodations are available during the application and interview process. To request an accommodation, contact Martha Adams careers@clgfoods.com

Pay: $100,000.00 - $120,000.00 per year

Benefits:

• 401(k)
• 401(k) matching
• Health insurance
• Paid time off

Experience:

• RTE and Food manufacturing: 4 years (Required)
• SQF : 4 years (Required)
• FISMA: 4 years (Required)
• FSIS: 4 years (Required)
• FDA regulations: 4 years (Required)

Ability to Commute:

• Halethorpe, MD 21227 (Preferred)

Ability to Relocate:

• Halethorpe, MD 21227: Relocate before starting work (Preferred)

Work Location: In person

Salary : $100,000 - $120,000