Customer Technologist

PrepWorld are looking for a **Maternity Cover, Customer Technologist** to effectively manage and deliver the technical agenda and build strong relationships with selected retail customers. To represent PrepWorld with customers and third parties from a technical perspective. To ensure there is relevant and adequate technical capability of our premium, high care, ready-to-eat products from raw material to PrepWorld customers in line with customer codes of practice and technical requirements

**Main Duties**:
(Customer Relationship Building)
- Ensure that strong and proactive relationships are built with retailers technical representatives and that all requests and tasks are managed efficiently both for individual accounts and across the wider customer technical team
- Represent PrepWorld in customer technical meetings, conferences, benchmarking, visits, audits and other customer events, feeding back relevant information to the wider PrepWorld Team and following up actions appropriately
- Exchange quality and availability information with customers throughout the season
- Proactively engage with the retailer’s technical representative to ensure continuous and mutually beneficial development of the account
- Ensure there is adequate provision of technical support to the factory and wider team to ensure compliance with customer requirements
- Ensure retailer online portals/systems are maintained with accuracy and all alerts and communications are responded to/actioned accordingly

(Monitoring and reporting on KPIs)
- Manage the investigation process into product rejections and complaints and communicate with suppliers and customers to understand causes of product issues
- Produce corrective action plans and ensure implementation
- Communicate regularly with the retailer regarding the site’s KPIs and trends
- Quantify and analyse technical information and feedback to the PrepWorld management team to influence and support commercial decisions
- Actively take part in company-wide initiatives to combat complaints and rejections

(New and Existing Product Development)
- Actively work with the NPD team to lead and drive the delivery of new product development projects
- Work with the retailer’s technical representative to ensure any NPD / EPD is in line with the factory’s capabilities and their expectation of the finished product attributes are aligned to what is achievable
- Manage and advise on new product development from a technical perspective
- Ensure all technical activities required to launch NPD / EPD are completed within the required timeframe
- Manage the writing of specifications, artwork approval, pre-production trials and other key NPD activities

(Quality Management)
- Proactively engage in site-wide initiatives and projects to improve quality and shelf life
- Understand and pre-empt quality issues by conducting store visits and providing feedback to the factory
- Manage and support with the creation and maintenance of customer quality contracts and QASs and ensure their content is accurate and achievable
- Work with the wider team to implement corrective actions in light of any quality issues found either internally or by the retailer.

**Who we are looking for**:
(Quals)
- A qualified graduate in a Horticulture, Postharvest, Food Technology or similar fields
- HACCP, Auditing, Food Safety qualification would be advantageous

(Knowledge and experience)
- Minimum of 3 years’ experience in a food technical role (ideally customer facing)
- Experience of working with and managing the major UK retailers
- Experience of a high care, ready-to-eat environment and preferably with fresh produce
- Involvement in the NPD process

(Skills)
- Strong interpersonal skills with the ability to negotiate and communicate with internal and external stakeholders
- Self-organised approach and the ability to plan a workload
- Resilient with a strong work ethic and a proactive approach to personal development
- Flexible approach and be willing to adapt ways of working to support team requirements
- Proven time management skills and be accustomed to working with and meeting time critical deadlines
- Good standard of spoken and written English
- Ability to work well under pressure and proactively seek win/win solutions
- Proficiency with Microsoft Word, Excel and Outlook

**Contract type**: Maternity cover - 1 year initially

**Days and hours of work**: Mon - Fri, 08:00 - 17:00 with 1 hour unpaid break included each day. There will be some hybrid working opportunity

**Salary**:£30,000 - £32,000 p/a