Director, Food Manufacturing & Production

San Francisco, CA | On-site | $120,000-$147,500 base salary

We are working with a founder-led specialty food manufacturer to hire a Director of Food Manufacturing & Production for its San Francisco production facility.

This is first and foremost a hands-on production leadership role.

We are looking for someone who has led frontline teams in a food manufacturing environment and knows how to be present on the production floor. The right person hires well, develops people, sets clear expectations, addresses performance issues directly, and builds a team where people take pride in both the work and one another.

The operation includes an experienced production team of ~12-15 people. This Director will be highly visible in the facility and closely involved in daily production while owning responsibility for the people, processes, safety, food-manufacturing discipline, staffing, output, and continuous improvement required to run the operation well.

Strong food-production and excellent team leadership, while maintaining and enhancing this excellent team culture, is what this is all about.

What You'll Own

• Lead, coach and develop a frontline food-production team of ~12-15 employees
• Own day-to-day production execution, staffing, labor deployment and production priorities
• Hire strong employees and develop greater leadership depth within the team
• Set clear expectations and manage performance with both accountability and respect
• Maintain a positive, high-performing working environment as the business grows
• Ensure strong adherence to safety practices, PPE, SOPs, GMPs, sanitation and food-safety requirements
• Coordinate production schedules, labor, materials and equipment needs
• Partner closely with food safety, quality, technical, facilities, finance and senior leadership
• Track and improve output, efficiency, yield, quality, downtime and other production measures
• Identify recurring production problems, determine root causes and improve processes
• Support new equipment, process changes and employee training
• Stay close enough to the floor to understand problems firsthand and help the team solve them

What We're Looking For

We are looking for someone with meaningful experience leading frontline employees in food or beverage manufacturing.

Relevant backgrounds could include specialty foods, confectionery, bakery, coffee roasting, snacks, prepared foods, dairy, ingredients, beverage or other hands-on food-production environments.

You do not need to know how to make this company's specific product. The team can teach the product and process. What matters much more is whether you know how to lead people and run production.

Most Important

You should have a demonstrated record of:

• Directly leading frontline/hourly employees in a food-manufacturing or food-production environment
• Personally managing daily production execution on the floor
• Hiring, training, coaching and developing production employees
• Managing employee performance and difficult conversations effectively
• Building accountability while maintaining a healthy team culture
• Working within GMP, food-safety, sanitation, SOP and workplace-safety requirements
• Managing production schedules, staffing and output
• Improving throughput, yield, quality, efficiency or other production performance measures
• Solving equipment, staffing, quality and production problems calmly and practically
• Learning new production processes quickly
• Improving an operation without assuming everything already in place needs to change

This role is best suited to a leader who likes being on the production floor and around the people doing the work, rather than someone who wants to manage the operation from several layers away.

We are especially interested in someone who wants to invest deeply in one operation, build an excellent team and help an already strong food-production organization become even better over time.