Raw Materials Manager

Location:          Lightbody - Scotland

Shift:                  Monday - Friday

Salary:               Competitive with Opportunity for Growth

Due to continued growth, we now have a new opportunity for a Raw Materials Manager to join our Technical team at our Lightbody’s bakery in Hamilton.

Finsbury Food Group is a leading speciality bakery manufacturer. We constantly raise quality and efficiency standards and build long-term relationships with major multiple retailers and the foodservice channel. The bread for your morning toast, ready for butter-spreading or egg-dipping. The candle-filled centrepiece for a memorable celebration. The buns, muffins and other treats that turn teatime into quality time. 135 years of craft baking skills lie behind the quality of the special branded cakes, sweet snacks and slices we produce in Hamilton and 55 million products are produced each year. Lightbody is the UK’s largest supplier of celebration cakes to UK retailers, with Disney, Mars, Universal and Thorntons all within the portfolio of branded cakes made under licence. We also make a variety of  supermarkets’ well-loved own-label cakes and in-store bakery bites.

The Raw Materials Manager will governance roles to ensure safe, legal, authentic and quality raw materials are supplied to Finsbury Food Group, whilst ensuring compliance to certification standards and any specific customer requirements. Each Raw Material Manager will be responsible for a number of product categories aligned with procurement and as such will become a subject matter expert in those areas.  These roles will report into the Group Regulatory Affairs Manager for whom they will also deputise.

 This is a fast paced role, where the successful candidate will have worked in a similar position and ideally have a Food Science Based Degree Qualification. They will have auditing experience within Food manufacturing and have excellent communication and stakeholder relationship skills.  

This role is based at our Lightbody’s Factory in Hamilton with regular travel throughout our Scottish Cluster. On occasion you will be required to attend one of our other Cluster areas (Northern or Southern) and customers for meetings which could be weekly or monthly, depending on the requirement.

 This is what you’ll actually do!

As the Raw Materials Manager, you will drive continuous improvement and expansion of the relationship and support function between the Raw Material Managers and purchasing.  Working closely with the corresponding category purchasing colleague to develop key working relationships with suppliers in order to become a subject matter expert within your assigned product categories.

To support this collaboration, business partnering skills are essential, as there is a requirement to attend purchasing meetings to present key technical supplier performance data, preparation of key supplier technical performance data for supplier based meetings and attendance at any multi-functional supplier based meetings.

 You will have in-depth knowledge of Finsbury manufacturing sites allergen restrictions and ingredient applications, you will be required to ensure all requirements are being met. You’ll review and approve all raw material specifications within the Ideagen/QADEX database, striving for gold standard content.  Once a specification is approved the information requires populating and validating within the P74 recipe management system. 

As the Raw Materials manager, you will have experience in using a Risk Assessment based approach, as you’ll work collaboratively as a team and with all FFG sites to develop and continuously improve standardised risk assessment templates and subsequent criteria. You will be responsible for completing VACCP risk assessments in accordance with the procedural frequency, feeding the outcome into the raw material and supplier risk assessment.

Ideally this is you!

•            Previous Experience in a similar position with a manufacturing environment

•            Food Science Based Degree Qualification (Including a Food Safety Certification)

•            Audit experience within a manufacturing environment

•            Experience in using a Risk Assessment based approach

•            Detailed knowledge of key raw materials

•            Food Law Knowledge

•            Allergen Awareness

•            VACCP knowledge/experience

 Our vision is to be the leading speciality bakery group in the UK, and we want the best people in place to achieve this. Our continued success is built entirely on the talented people who work here, so employee development is important to us because everyone is a valued member of the team, and we want every individual to have the skills and capabilities to achieve both your own personal goals and our business goals. We want good people to join our company, to help our company continue to go from strength to strength. If this sounds like you, please get in contact to learn more!