Raw Materials Technologist

**Raw Materials Technologist**

**Location**:Bo’ness, Falkirk

**Contract Type**:Perm

**Business Area**:Meals

**Shift**:Monday to Friday - 8.30am to 5.00pm

**Salary**:£28,000-£31,000 depending on experience

**Who are we?**

We are the leading provider of fresh prepared food in the UK, with an international presence in the US and China. Our 19,000 employees operate from 43 locations, developing and producing innovative food for a wide variety of occasions and budgets. In the UK, we work with leading grocery retailers, focusing on their own label brands.

**What do we do?**

Our Bakkavor business in Bo’ness, based near Falkirk, specialises in the production of fresh, high quality salad products working primarily with premium retailers. To give you a sense for the scale of manufacturing in Bo’ness we produce over 70million salad based meals and side dishes from our 2 manufacturing facilities employing over 1200 people in the town.

We have a fantastic opportunity for a Raw Materials Technologist to join our Technical Team based in Bo’ness, who are responsible for ensuring that customer, company and legal requirements for raw materials and supplier quality assurance are achieved.

**The role**

In this busy and exciting role, your key focus will be to complete food safety risk assessments and specifications for raw materials entering the business. Working cross-functionally to ensure all new raw materials are sourced and purchased from approved suppliers and to acceptable specifications.

Reporting to the Raw Materials Manager, your role will involve working closely with Group Central Technical, Specification, NPD, Buying, Process and Quality departments.

**Your day to day responsibilities will be to**:

- Complete food safety risk assessments for raw materials and liaise with suppliers to capture all relevant information
- Carry out ongoing assessment of ingredients to ensure suitability and compliance
- Ensure all raw materials have an approved and active specification on our insight system
- Generate, maintain and update relevant raw material systems and databases - liaising with Operations, Technical, Buying and NPD as appropriate
- Work closely with manager to ensure that all suppliers either existing to the business or a new supplier/material to be introduced into the business has full/current approval status
- Participate in Technical audits including customer and Group Technical
- Ensure that all information held centrally on supplier approval is reflective of the factories supply base and risk assessment outcome
- Escalate appropriately internally / externally if discrepancies are found
- Assist in the capture of information and co-ordination of responses in the event of a food safety alert.
- Assess suitability of materials against retailer’s codes of practice
- Open communication with the procurement, technical and operational teams - where products fall outside the specification into the reject category

**About you**

Ideally, you will have good knowledge of food safety and previous quality assurance experience in a fast-paced food manufacturing or FMCG environment.

Alternatively, you may be a recent graduate looking for their first step on the career ladder.

You will need to have excellent interpersonal, problem solving, decision making and communication skills, alongside the ability to analyse basic information, summarising and reporting this in a clear, competent manner - will all be key to this role.

**What you can expect from us**

When joining us you can expect a highly competitive rewards package including group pension, and other flexible benefits - alongside excellent career progression prospects across the Bakkavor group.