Raw Materials & Packaging Technologist

Location: Spalding, Lincolnshire

Contract Type: Permanent
Business Area: Meals
Shift: Monday to Friday – 8.30am to 5.00pm
Salary: competitive

Who are we?

We are the leading provider of fresh prepared food in the UK, with an international presence in the US and China. Our 18,500 employees operate from 39 locations, developing and producing innovative food for a wide variety of occasions and budgets. In the UK, we work with leading grocery retailers, focusing on their own label brands.

We have a fantastic opportunity for a Raw Materials Technologist to join our Technical Team based in Spalding, who are responsible for ensuring that customer, company and legal requirements for raw materials and supplier quality assurance are achieved.

The role

In this busy and exciting role, your key focus will be to complete food safety risk assessments and specifications for raw materials entering the business. Working cross–functionally to ensure all new raw materials are sourced and purchased from approved suppliers and to acceptable specifications.

Reporting to the Technical Services Manager, your role will involve working closely with Group Central Technical, Specification, NPD, Buying, Process and Quality departments.

Your day to day responsibilities will be to:

• Complete food safety risk assessments for raw materials and liaise with suppliers to capture all relevant information
• Carry out ongoing assessment of ingredients to ensure suitability and compliance
• Ensure all raw materials have an approved and active specification on our insight system
• Generate, maintain, and update relevant raw material systems and databases - liaising with Operations, Technical, Buying and NPD as appropriate
• Work closely with manager to ensure that all suppliers either existing to the business or a new supplier/material to be introduced into the business has full/current approval status
• Participate in Technical audits including customer and Group Technical
• Ensure that all information held centrally on supplier approval is reflective of the factories supply base and risk assessment outcome
• Escalate appropriately internally / externally if discrepancies are found
• Assist in the capture of information and co-ordination of responses in the event of a food safety alert.  
• Assess suitability of materials against retailer’s codes of practice
• Open communication with the procurement, technical and operational teams - where products fall outside the specification into the reject category
   

About you

Ideal candidate needs to have:

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• Drive and enthusiasm in all aspects of the technical role.  Be able to work effectively within a team environment and also on own initiative
• Be computer literate and conversant in Word, Excel and Access packages and be able to generate procedures, graphs, reports and presentations
• Have a flexible approach to the role and the hours required as dictated by the business needs
• Be an effective communicator (written and oral) at all levels of management and with both internal and external customers / suppliers
• Minimum of 2 years experience at a senior QA level with a good understanding of HACCP

What you can expect from us

When joining us you can expect a highly competitive rewards package including group pension , and other flexible benefits - alongside excellent career progression prospects across the Bakkavor group.