Food Safety & Quality Assurance Senior Culinary Specialist – Away From Home

Overview

PepsiCo is looking for Food Safety & Quality Assurance Culinary Specialist - Away From Home, Europe to join in our R&D team in Leicester.

The primary focus of this newly created R&D Food Safety role is to partner with the R&D AFH Europe lead, Global AFH Leads and all Europe business partners to execute our AFH Strategy across Europe. The role will operate across a breadth of initiatives (Culinary, New Business Models, Commercial Change, Portfolio Optimisation) in partnership with Europe Foods R&D, Global AFH R&D and the Global Commercial AFH Team.

This is a highly collaborative role, requiring thought leadership and the ability to embrace & influence change in an ambiguous environment.

Responsibilities

• Lead and execute complex projects ensuring Food Safety and quality principles are realized and delivered at all events. Leveraging solid technical project management tools and skills to ensure objectives are accomplished on time, to the agreed standards and within budget.
• Partner with Sales and Marketing to understand customer and business needs as well as back of house operations, ingredients pantry, supply chain and other desirability, feasibility and viability inputs and constraints to consider when proposing culinary solutions.
• Ensure Food Safety Playbooks are aligned, established and followed to ensure all events/operations are executed with a focus on food safety.
• Apply Technical & Business Governance processes effectively from feasibility stage right through to scale-up & post launch support
• Lead projects independently with minimal input from line manager escalating issues as required
• Contribute to workstreams to improve ways of working across the team e.g. improvement of business processes to drive greater efficiencies, sharing of knowledge to create better team cohesion & developing others through embedding best practice
• Provide FSQA voice in cross-functional forums and work as an effective business partner in collaboration with R&D discipline partners.
• Delivering compliance to allergen, local regulations and ensuring mystery shop assessments are completed at each event.
  
  

Qualifications

• Graduate in a Food Science, microbiology or similar field looking to build a long-term career within R&D.
• Minimum 5 years in quick service, restaurant operations or head quarters culinary based operations roles
• Fundamental understanding of trends, ingredients, culinary techniques and integration into product development, as well as a fundamental working knowledge of food & nutrition science.
• Fundamental understand of food safety requirements in quick service, restaurant operations.
• Good technical, analytical and communication skills, ability to interpret data and distil into useful and actionable information
• Strives for high standards, seeks innovative solutions, rives continuous improvement of products and processes and demonstrates a high attention to detail.
• Ability to collaborate and communicate effectively to R&D Team and all other functions involved (Marketing, Operations, GP, PD, RA, QD)
• Creative thinking, be able to generate creative, workable ideas within the scope of projects.
• Results driven, demonstrate an ability to persevere and provide timely and direct feedback to others
• Ability to be able to work independently and to deal with change and increasing complexity.
• Self-starter, self-motivating and experience of automatous delivery.
• Integrity, Safeguard the Company’s designs, formulations, processes and reputation in all matters.
• Ability to prioritize among the different and numerous projects managed.