product specialist

About The Role

We are currently looking for a Technical Specialist to join our Thrapston site, our fruit packing site in Northamptonshire. You will work as part of our technical department and will be responsible for ensuring all our suppliers and growers produce is of the highest standard and fully compliant with both industry and Morrison’s standards.

You will be the frontline representative of the business to drive end to end quality standards, ensuring that all product delivered into site and then delivered into depot meets agreed specifications. Ensuring you are seen as a subject matter expert in your field to build strong and lasting relationships with our suppliers, ensuring you champion customer focus throughout the supply chain.

You will be responsible for:

• Ensure suppliers and growers meet relevant quality standards and conform to food safety, legality and ethical requirements
• Provide financial yield analysis and operational efficiencies data to support procurement decisions
• Collate and approve category supplier due diligence data
• Reducing stock working capital, depot rejections, complaints & refunds and site rejections
• Provide expertise, training and excellent communication of product quality for a specific product area in a Manufacturing site
• Auditing, approving and liaising with suppliers/growers, providing the site team, technical manager and trader with detailed insight on raw material quality, flagging potential issues and supporting interpretation of specifications
• Recommend to site which stock should be used to maximise yield
• Provide commercially impactful technical expertise and advice to improve profitability in this category
• Partner with Buyers on developing sourcing strategy and supply base, also understanding next deliveries based on season and weather impact
• Manage difficult seasons or periods without compromising product safety or quality
• Escalation of potential safety, quality, legality or ethical issues to Central & Site Technical teams and Buyers (as appropriate)
• Review grading results and monitor produce quality to feedback to producers

Why not take a look around one of our Manufacturing sites? Click here.

About The Company

From a Bradford market stall to the UK’s 4th largest supermarket chain and the UK's 2nd largest fresh food manufacturer.We are proud to be the Yorkshire food retailer serving customers across the UK at just under 500 stores and an online home delivery service. Our 18 manufacturing sites provide our customers with the freshest produce from flowers, fish and veg to burgers and bread, all delivered to our stores via our 6 distribution sites by our 2,000 strong fleet.Every week, 11 million customers pass through our doors and over 110,000 colleagues across the business work hard each day to deliver great service to them. We cover more than 11 million households with our Morrisons.com service. With competitive, permanently low prices we are committed to helping our customers save money every day.We are foodmakers and shopkeepers and #wemakemorrisons.Why not hear what our teams about got to say about life here at Morrisons: Click here.

About You

We’re looking for someone who has previously worked in a similar role, understanding food production as a whole but with expert knowledge of fruit. You'll ideally come from a technical/quality background, understanding agriculture, audit of suppliers, relevant standards (AFS, Global Gap, BRC) and have intermediate food safety knowledge and HACCP. You’ll have a solid commercial understanding, with demonstrable experience of enhancing supplier and yield performance and how this impacts the wider business.

We’re also looking for someone who can:

• Build and maintain a network of contacts both internal and external with the ability to influence
• Leadership skills, promoting a strong sense of teamwork and training hourly colleagues
• Experience working in a complex and fast paced environment
• Share ideas and findings in a clear direct way both internally and externally
• Ability to use data to drive intelligent decision making and influence future seasons

In return for your hard work we will offer you:

• Six weeks holiday (including bank holidays)
• 15% discount in our stores available from the day you join us
• Additional 10% discount card for a friend or family member
• Career progression and development opportunities
• Subsidised staff canteen
• Free parking
• Market leading pension and life assurance
• Healthcare/Wellbeing benefits including Aviva Digital GP
• Morrisons MyPerks with discounts at high street shops, cinemas and gyms, and lots more
• Long Service Awards
• Optional Payroll charity donations
• Enhanced Family/maternity/parental leave