Quality Assurance Lead

What you become part of:

Sidcup Operations plays a pivotal role within the CCEP network, producing around 50% of the GB SKU portfolio. The site offers a one stop shop to the GB Market with a range of packages that are single sourced from Sidcup, such as the wide portfolio range of small cans. Across their 7 manufacturing lines the site can produce 480,000 cans every hour, 96,000 PET bottles every hour and 48,000 Glass bottles.

There are currently around 300 employees across Manufacturing, QSE, Engineering, and Distribution. For the right candidate there is excellent career opportunities, both within the Sidcup and further afield across other GB and Pan-European locations within the CCEP network.

Job Purpose

To champion quality and food safety across your operations area by leading people, improving processes and driving a culture of continuous improvement, ensuring every product meets the highest standards of safety, quality and customer satisfaction

Key Responsibilities

• Lead, support, and develop business unit teams to deliver exceptional quality and food safety performance, fostering a culture of accountability, engagement, and continuous improvement.
• Promote and maintain a strong quality and food safety culture across all operational areas, ensuring compliance with company standards, customer requirements, industry regulations, and food safety legislation.
• Manage the end-to-end customer complaints process, ensuring timely investigation, robust root cause analysis, implementation of effective corrective and preventive actions, and prevention of recurrence.
• Monitor, analyse, and drive improvements in quality and food safety performance through the effective management of key performance indicators (KPIs), identifying trends and implementing actions to address performance gaps.
• Support and coordinate all Quality and Food Safety audits, including internal, external, customer, and regulatory audits, ensuring operational readiness and timely closure of audit findings.
• Develop, implement, and monitor action plans arising from audits, complaints, non-conformances, and quality performance reviews to ensure sustained improvement.
• Collaborate with Engineering, Technology, and Operations teams to support new product introductions, capital investment projects, process improvements, and the implementation of new technologies and equipment, ensuring quality and food safety requirements are embedded throughout.
• Drive continuous improvement initiatives using problem-solving methodologies and Operational Excellence principles to enhance product quality, food safety, operational efficiency, and customer satisfaction.
• Lead investigations into quality and food safety incidents, ensuring root causes are identified and corrective actions are implemented effectively and verified for long-term sustainability.
• Support cross-functional Operational Excellence and continuous improvement projects, providing quality and food safety expertise to deliver sustainable business improvements.
• Build strong relationships with internal and external stakeholders to ensure alignment on quality and food safety objectives, standards, and business priorities.
• Ensure quality and food safety risks are identified, assessed, and managed appropriately, driving a proactive approach to risk reduction and compliance across the operation.