Head of Operational Quality

This is an exciting opportunity to join Refresco UK in a senior quality leadership role where you will drive the operational quality and food safety agenda across our UK manufacturing network, ensuring consistent standards, continuous improvement, and a strong quality culture across all sites.

Head of Operational Quality

Permanent

What's in it for you?

• Annual bonus and regular pay reviews
• Private healthcare up to family level
• Early Friday finish to kick-start your weekend
• 28 days of annual leave plus bank holidays
• Option to purchase additional leave, increasing your allowance to 31 days plus bank holidays
• Life assurance coverage
• Income protection
• 24/7 virtual GP access for you and your family
• Free eye-care vouchers and discounted glasses
• Employee referral scheme with bonuses for successful referrals
• GroceryAid support services offering financial, legal, wellbeing and practical guidance
• Cheers benefits platform providing discounts, free perks, and wellbeing tools

About The Role

As Head of Operational Quality, you will lead the implementation of Refresco UK's Quality and Food Safety strategy across all manufacturing sites, ensuring operational quality programmes consistently meet internal, customer, regulatory and GFSI requirements.

Reporting to the QESH Director, you will work closely with site quality and operational teams to drive a "One Team" approach, strengthening collaboration, capability and quality culture across the business. You will play a key role in supporting operational excellence by improving quality performance, reducing the cost of poor quality and ensuring best practice is embedded throughout the UK network.

Key responsibilities will include:

• Drive the operational quality implementation strategy across all UK manufacturing sites.
• Ensure Quality and Food Safety programmes consistently meet food safety, legality and customer requirements.
• Develop and promote a "One Team" quality culture across site and central quality teams.
• Build strong working relationships with operational leadership teams to embed quality ownership throughout the business.
• Coach, mentor and develop operational quality teams to enhance technical capability and performance.
• Develop practical processes, tools and training programmes that support continuous quality improvement.
• Ensure robust site quality plans are maintained and that verification activities are appropriately resourced and executed.
• Develop and lead improvement programmes to enhance quality KPIs, reduce CPMU and minimise the cost of poor quality.
• Lead and support the successful delivery of customer, regulatory and third-party audits.
• Collaborate with operational teams to investigate and resolve quality performance issues.
• Measure, track and report quality performance metrics across the UK business.
• Support site change management activities to maintain quality, food safety and legal compliance.
• Lead incident escalation processes and ensure timely resolution of quality and food safety issues.
• Drive best practice adoption across sites through benchmarking, shared learning and continuous improvement.
• Champion Food Safety Culture initiatives through awareness campaigns, engagement activities and training programmes.
• Promote Refresco's commitment to health and safety, food safety, sustainability and operational excellence.

About You

The ideal candidate will be an experienced quality leader with a strong background in FMCG manufacturing and a proven track record of implementing quality and food safety strategies across multiple sites. You will be a confident influencer, capable of building strong relationships and driving sustainable improvements across operations.

We want someone who will lead and role model the Refresco core values of Agile, Responsible, Excellent, Passionate and Entrepreneurial. Find out more about our values here:

About Refresco

Refresco is the global independent beverage solutions provider for Global, National and Emerging brands, and retailers with production in Europe, North America, and Australia. Refresco offers an extensive range of product and packaging combinations from juices to carbonated soft drinks and mineral waters in carton, PET, Aseptic PET, cans, and glass.

Refresco continuously searches for new and alternative ways to improve the quality of its products and packaging combinations in line with consumer and customer demand, environmental responsibilities, and market trends.

Refresco is headquartered in Rotterdam, the Netherlands and has more than 13,500 employees.

Our drinks on every table. That's the Refresco vision.

We're the proud owners of six drinks manufacturing sites within the UK, employing over 1,800 colleagues who produce private label soft drinks and fruit juices for many of the UK's leading retailers.

Whether it's packed in cartons, bottles, or cans, we ensure that our products are made to the highest quality standards and delivered to our customers when and where they need them.

Refresco believes that equal opportunity for all is fundamental to our company's values and all our applicants can expect fairness and transparency in our recruitment process.

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