Key Responsibilities
Strategic Sourcing & Cost Management
- Develop and execute sourcing strategies to ensure a consistent supply of ingredients, commodities, packaging, and other key spending categories.
- Manage the end-to-end procurement process; lead supplier negotiations, competitive bids, contracts, and commercial terms.
- Deliver measurable cost savings, cost avoidance, value engineering, and specification optimization.
- Monitor commodity and ingredient markets and provide forward-looking visibility to cost and supply changes.
Supplier Management & Supply Assurance:
- Identify and evaluate potential suppliers, develop a high-performing supplier base that meets cost, quality, service, food-safety, and capacity requirements.
- Build and maintain strong and strategic supplier relationships that provide access to innovation, market intelligence, capacity, and continuous improvement.
- Establish supplier scorecards and conduct regular business reviews with strategic suppliers.
- Identify supply risks and implement dual-source, alternative-source, and contingency strategies for critical materials.
Planning, S&OP, Inventory & Innovation:
- Work closely with other departments, including Operations and Planning, Commercial, R&D, QA and Finance, to align procurement activities with business objectives.
- Participate actively in S&OP, translating demand and production requirements into effective procurement plans.
- Partner with Planning and Operations to ensure material availability while optimizing inventory and working capital.
- Work with R&D and Commercial teams on new business, new products, reformulations, cost improvements, and commercialization.
- Engage suppliers as innovation partners to identify improved ingredients, packaging, processes, and technologies.
- Manage supplier lead times, MOQs, safety stocks, and purchasing parameters.
- Identify and reduce excess and obsolete raw material and packaging inventory.
Quality, Food Safety & Innovation
- Partner with Quality to ensure suppliers meet company, customer, regulatory, and food-safety requirements.
- Support supplier qualification, audits, specifications, corrective actions, and change-control processes.
Procurement Excellence
- Establish effective procurement policies, processes, approval controls, and sourcing disciplines.
- Leverage technology and data analytics to enhance procurement decision-making and reporting.
- Improve ERP/master-data accuracy and purchasing controls.
- Develop reporting and dashboards covering spending, savings, supplier performance, commodity exposure, inventory, and supply risk.
- Continuously improve procurement processes, analytics, and organizational capabilities.
Leadership
· Lead, coach, and develop the procurement/purchasing team.
· Set clear goals, responsibilities, performance expectations and accountability, and provide regular feedback and development opportunities.
· Develop the organization from transactional purchasing toward strategic category and supplier management.
· Build strong cross-functional relationships across Operations, Supply Chain, Finance, Quality, R&D, Commercial, and senior leadership.
Qualifications
· Bachelor's degree in Supply Chain, Business, Operations, Finance, Food Science, or related discipline.
· Minimum of 7-10 years of progressive procurement, sourcing, or supply-chain experience, including leadership responsibility.
· Strong experience within food manufacturing, CPG, ingredients, private label and/or co-manufacturing.
· Demonstrated experience sourcing food ingredients, commodities, and packaging.
· Strong negotiation skills and experience in managing supplier contracts
· Understanding of commodity markets, standard costing, PPV, inventory, working capital, and margin management.
· Experience working within FDA/USDA-regulated food manufacturing and GFSI-recognized food-safety systems preferred.
· Strong ERP/MRP analytics capabilities, analytical and commercial skills
· Excellent leadership and team management skills.
· Ability to work in a fast-paced environment and manage multiple priorities.
