A little bit about us, we are BEAR!
We’re an ambitious young company determined to take a big bite out of bad snacking habits. Grrr. We make pure fruit snacks with no added nonsense that make being healthy a little bit easier and a whole lot tastier. Real Fruit, Real Flavour, Real Fun!
We started out making our tasty pure fruit yoyos, and now also make a whole host of other tasty pure fruit products too that go into several snacking categories: ‘paws’ for babies and toddlers, crunchy ‘Alphabites’ cereal with no refined sugar or salt. Ice lollies made from only two ingredients and a big ambition to take this brand beyond the above.
Since we launched 14 years ago, we’ve grown quickly and we are currently sold in all the UK’s supermarkets and grrreat stores across the UK. Now we are taking BEAR around the world and have really ambitious plans for our international growth. We are a growing team of 38 people, as well as our colleagues in the Lotus Bakeries Natural Foods division; a family of brands that we joined in 2021.
This is a fantastic opportunity for someone who is looking to continue building their technical career, driving forwards safety and quality standards within a fast paced environment across innovative, healthy brands. You will work in a team with scope to grow and develop as our brands continue to grow.
The position will suit an energetic, passionate, self-motivated person who will drive forwards technical standards within Bear and Urban Fruit. You will enjoy a fast-paced environment, be flexible and adaptive, be a great team player and possess good communication and interpersonal skills.
Alongside living our TOP values of Team Spirit, Open Dialogue, and Passion, the most important things we’re looking for from you are being responsible for the safety, quality and legality of a range of products within the BEAR, and Urban Fruit brands, specifically:
* Visiting and auditing 3rd party manufacturers, compiling and submitting reports, following up on any non-conformances to support due diligence required and driving forwards continuous improvement plans.
* Maintaining supplier and product risk assessments for your area of responsibility
* Ensuring products are compliant with relevant food and age group legislation, and proactivily following up on compliance with any upcoming legislation changes
* Ensuring quality and food safety standards are in place for all NPD/EPD projects
* Ensuring products are produced to specification via establishing a quality and food safety monitoring process over shelf life, following up on any deviations and making sure product specification includes appropriate quality attributes.
* Setting supplier KPI’s, investigating complaints, identifying trends and working with suppliers on complaint reduction plans.
* Raising any non-conformances and working with suppliers to identify root cause and sign off suppliers corrective actions.
* Being the ‘go-to’ for cross-functional teams for any queries related to the quality and food safety of products.
* Streamlining and further developing the Quality Management System with the Lotus QA team as well as supporting with internal audits.
* Ensuring the QMS is implemented internally and externally at suppliers.
* Liaising with the central Lotus QA team and suppliers to ensure product and site certifications are maintained and in line with international market requirements.
* Prepare and report quality KPI’s to senior management
Desirable skills:
* Knowledge of HACCP and ability to apply the principles practically to different product categories
* Good knowledge and awareness of GFSI recognised standards
* Comfortable performing risk assessments and communicating the outcome of these in an effective way
* Track record of delivering results in relation to product quality and supplier compliance
* Previous experience in a technical role, working with cross functional departments and with 3rd party manufacturers and auditing of suppliers.
* Good knowledge of Quality Management Systems, and ideally experience in writing procedures and/or internal auditing
* Have good relationship building skills
* Highly organized and able to prioritise