Essential FunctionsThis position is responsible for:
Enterprise Systems and Strategy - Developing and executing an enterprise food safety and sanitation strategy across all manufacturing locations.
- Designing scalable management systems, standards, governance, and operating routines that create consistent execution across facilities and shifts.
- Creating a multi-year roadmap that anticipates regulatory changes, customer expectations, business growth, new products, capital needs, and emerging food safety risks.
- Establishing leading and lagging performance indicators, dashboards, review cadences, and escalation systems that make performance and risk visible.
- Using trend analysis and risk-based prioritization to move the organization from reactive problem-solving to prevention.
- Standardizing sanitation policies, procedures, controls, verification practices, and documentation across the company.
- Promoting a culture in which sanitation is recognized as a critical food safety and business process, not simply a cleaning function.
Sanitation Excellence and Operational Reliability - Establishing enterprise standards for sanitation programs, Sanitation Standard Operating Procedures, master sanitation schedules, pre-operational readiness, verification methods, and documentation.
- Developing and maintaining company standards for Clean-in-Place and Clean-out-of-Place systems.
- Ensuring cleaning programs consider critical parameters such as time, temperature, chemical concentration, conductivity, mechanical action, flow, and rinse effectiveness.
- Improving sanitation effectiveness while optimizing labor, water, chemical, energy, and production time.
- Partnering with plant teams to reduce sanitation-related downtime, delayed start-ups, repeat deficiencies, product risk, and unnecessary operating costs.
- Providing technical leadership for sanitation chemistry, allergen cleaning, pest management, biofilm control, and hygienic manufacturing.
- Evaluating sanitation technologies and practices that can improve process control, visibility, reliability, and resource efficiency.
- Ensuring changes to sanitation programs are appropriately reviewed, validated, documented, communicated, and sustained.
Food Safety, Environmental Monitoring, and Compliance - Ensuring sanitation programs support applicable FDA, FSMA Preventive Controls, Good Manufacturing Practices, HACCP, Pasteurized Milk Ordinance, Juice HACCP, customer, and certification requirements.
- Leading enterprise sanitation readiness for regulatory inspections, customer audits, third-party certification audits, and internal reviews.
- Maintaining systems that support continuous audit and inspection readiness.
- Partnering with Quality to strengthen environmental monitoring, hygienic zoning, sanitation verification, and preventive controls.
- Using sanitation, environmental, quality, and operational data to identify recurring issues and emerging risks.
- Leading or supporting root-cause investigations involving environmental positives, microbiological events, sanitation failures, spoilage trends, product concerns, and food safety incidents.
- Ensuring corrective and preventive actions are timely, documented, verified for effectiveness, and sustained.
- Monitoring emerging regulatory and customer expectations and translating them into practical operating requirements.
- Building and maintaining active connection points with regulators, industry associations, certification bodies, customers, technical experts, peer networks, and key suppliers to gain early visibility into emerging requirements, risks, technologies, and best practices.
- Establishing a formal regulatory and food safety horizon-scanning process that identifies proposed rules, guidance, enforcement trends, customer expectations, scientific developments, and industry signals; assesses enterprise impact; assigns ownership; and drives implementation before requirements become urgent.
- Providing leadership with a recurring forward-looking regulatory and emerging-risk briefing, including likely timing, business exposure, required decisions, resource needs, and readiness status.
Hygienic Design and Capital Integration - Partnering with Engineering and Maintenance during equipment selection, design review, installation, commissioning, and start-up.
- Incorporating cleanability, accessibility, drainage, material compatibility, hygienic design, and sanitation validation into project requirements.
- Reviewing existing and proposed equipment for sanitation access and effective cleaning.
- Identifying equipment and facility conditions that prevent effective sanitation.
- Prioritizing improvements based on food safety, regulatory, customer, and operational risk.
- Participating in capital planning and evaluating investments that improve sanitation control, process reliability, or resource efficiency.
- Helping establish sanitation and hygienic design criteria for new equipment and facility projects.
Leadership and Capability Building - Leading, coaching, and developing sanitation managers, supervisors, technical leaders, and cross-functional partners.
- Establishing clear expectations, responsibilities, and accountability across Operations, Quality, Sanitation, Maintenance, and Engineering.
- Building standardized training, qualification, cross-training, and succession systems for critical sanitation capabilities.
- Strengthening managers' and supervisors' understanding of sanitation science, food safety risks, documentation, escalation, and preventive controls.
- Developing organizational bench strength and reducing dependency on individual technical experts.
- Influencing across functions and facilities by translating technical requirements into clear and practical operating expectations.
- Promoting disciplined execution, curiosity, continuous improvement, early escalation, and shared ownership for food safety.
- Creating an environment in which employees understand not only what must be done, but why it matters.
Qualifications Mandatory Job Requirements To be eligible for this position, an individual must possess the following requirements to perform the essential job functions:
- Must be able to work in active food manufacturing environments, including production areas, sanitation zones, laboratories, warehouses, coolers, and equipment rooms.
- Must be able to walk, stand, and climb stairs for extended periods during plant-floor and sanitation observation, including during non-operating hours.
- Must be able to travel regularly among company manufacturing facilities, approximately 60% of the time.
- Must be able to work flexible and off-shift hours to support sanitation activities, audits, investigations, commissioning, and urgent food safety or sanitation events.
- Must be able to communicate clearly, in writing and verbally, with plant leadership, technical staff, and cross-functional and executive stakeholders.
- Must be able to follow all company GMP, PPE, food safety, chemical safety, and site safety requirements.
- Must be able to fulfill the other physical requirements of the position detailed in the "Physical Requirements" section.
- Bachelor's degree in Food Science, Dairy Science, Microbiology, Engineering, or a related technical discipline required.
Minimum - Knowledge, Skills and Abilities - Bachelor's degree in Food Science, Dairy Science, Microbiology, Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
- At least 10 years of progressive leadership experience in food safety, sanitation, quality, or food manufacturing operations.
- Demonstrated experience designing, implementing, and improving sanitation or food safety systems in food, dairy, beverage, or refrigerated manufacturing.
- Strong working knowledge of FSMA Preventive Controls, HACCP, Good Manufacturing Practices, environmental monitoring, sanitation verification, CIP and COP systems, food microbiology, hygienic design, root-cause analysis, and corrective and preventive action systems.
- Experience leading complex, cross-functional change.
- Demonstrated ability to create sustainable standards, operating routines, performance measures, and accountability systems.
- Strong analytical, communication, coaching, and decision-making skills.
- Ability to translate complex technical requirements into practical plant-floor systems.
- Ability to travel regularly among company manufacturing facilities.
- Flexibility to support off-shift sanitation activities, audits, investigations, commissioning, and urgent food safety or sanitation events when needed.
Preferred Qualifications - Multi-site food manufacturing leadership experience.
- Experience in dairy, cultured products, fluid milk, ice cream, juice, tea, or ready-to-drink beverage manufacturing.
- PCQI, HACCP, SQF Practitioner, or equivalent food safety certification.
- Experience supporting SQF, BRCGS, FSSC 22000, customer, or regulatory audits.
- Experience with sanitation transformation, continuous improvement, data visualization, and digital management systems.
- Experience participating in hygienic design reviews, capital projects, equipment commissioning, and sanitation validation.
- Knowledge of lean manufacturing or other continuous improvement methodologies.
- Master's degree in a related discipline.
Leadership Profile The ideal candidate is a forward-thinking systems leader who sees the connections among people, processes, equipment, data, technology, and risk.
This leader can establish a long-term strategy while remaining close enough to plant-floor execution to understand failure modes, remove barriers, and ensure improvements are practical and sustained. The successful candidate will be curious, analytical, collaborative, and comfortable challenging existing practices.
This person will anticipate what the organization will need next, build scalable systems before problems occur, and create the structure, visibility, and accountability required for lasting performance.
