Plant Manager

We are partnering with a fast-growing, innovation-led food and beverage ingredients business to appoint a Plant Manager for one of its key manufacturing facilities in Carlsbad, CA.

This site plays an important role in the company’s broader ingredient platform, producing value-added products for leading food, beverage, and CPG customers. The Plant Manager will be responsible for leading day-to-day site operations, driving operational performance, strengthening production discipline, and ensuring the facility continues to deliver safely, efficiently, and to the highest quality standards.

This is a hands-on leadership role suited to someone who understands food, beverage, ingredients, or broader CPG manufacturing, has strong plant-floor credibility, and can bring structure, accountability, and continuous improvement into a fast-moving production environment.

Key Responsibilities:

• Lead all day-to-day manufacturing operations across facility
• Own site performance across safety, quality, production, cost, service, labor, and efficiency.
• Manage and develop production, maintenance, sanitation, warehouse, and operational support teams.
• Drive a strong culture of safety, food safety, quality, accountability, and continuous improvement.
• Partner closely with Quality, Supply Chain, R&D, Commercial, and Senior Leadership to ensure customer requirements are met.
• Oversee production planning, staffing, scheduling, throughput, yield, downtime, and operational execution.
• Identify and implement process improvements across manufacturing, labor utilization, equipment reliability, and plant systems.
• Ensure compliance with GMPs, food safety standards, sanitation requirements, regulatory expectations, and customer audit standards.
• Support new product launches, process improvements, scale-up activity, and commercialization projects.
• Build clear operating routines, KPIs, and reporting structures to improve visibility and accountability across the plant.
• Lead troubleshooting efforts across production, equipment, quality, and process-related challenges.
• Manage site budgets, operating costs, labor spend, and capital improvement priorities.
• Develop supervisors and frontline leaders to create a more disciplined, capable, and engaged plant team.

Ideal Candidate Profile:

• Plant Management, Operations Management, or senior Production leadership experience within food, beverage, ingredients, specialty manufacturing, or broader CPG manufacturing.
• Strong understanding of food safety, GMPs, sanitation, quality systems, and regulated manufacturing environments.
• Experience leading teams in a hands-on plant environment.
• Track record improving operational performance, including efficiency, downtime, yield, labor productivity, safety, and quality.
• Comfortable working in a fast-paced, growth-oriented business where systems may still be evolving.
• Strong communication skills with the ability to lead both frontline teams and cross-functional stakeholders.
• Continuous improvement mindset, with practical experience implementing process discipline and operational structure.
• Experience within value-added ingredients, liquid processing, dry blending, extracts, flavors, functional ingredients, or specialty food and beverage manufacturing would be highly relevant but is not essential.

Key Requirements

• 7 years of progressive manufacturing leadership experience.
• Experience in food, beverage, ingredients, CPG, or regulated manufacturing.
• Prior responsibility for site-level or department-level operational performance.
• Strong people leadership capability across hourly and salaried teams.
• Demonstrated ability to improve plant processes, team accountability, and production performance.
• Bachelor’s degree preferred, but equivalent operational leadership experience will be considered.