food technical manager

Fruit Towers - London

innocent started with a simple mission: to make drinks that make it easy to do yourself some good. In 1999 we concocted a few smoothies in our kitchen and tested them on people at a music festival; today we’re blending every type of fruit & veg under the sun and selling drinks right across Europe. We have great ambitions: to show the world that you can build a successful business that cares about more than just profit, and to leave things better than we find them. We’re proud to call ourselves Europe’s favourite little healthy drinks company, but we’re still growing. And that means we need more brilliant people who share our ambition, to join in with the next, most exciting, part of our story.

what you'll be doing

Hello,

We’ve come a long way from selling smoothies in West London in 1999. Today, innocent’s healthy little drinks are flying off the shelves across Western Europe, we’re achieving meaty double-digit growth, and selling over £250m each year of smoothies, juices and coconut water.

As you might have guessed, we’re pretty passionate about fruit, and sourcing the finest fruit and ingredients we can find for our drinks. For this reason we’re looking for an ingredients technologist with commercial experience to join our ingredients sourcing and technical team.

In this role, you’ll have technical responsibility for managing suppliers all around the world, making sure we are able to source the best ingredients for our innocent products. You’ll be also working with new and existing ingredient suppliers to make sure they adhere to our super high standards.

As an ingredient whizz, you’ll be the first point of contact for any quality or food safety issues relating to our ingredients. You'll be the person to spot and manage any discrepancies and find the best ways to resolve them.
The role will also include some specific technical project responsibilities, which will be decided later based on the business needs when you join us.

you'll have

We’re looking for someone with previous food industry experience as an Ingredient Technologist or Technical Manager, or someone who has been busy building up their technical skills by working with a food retailer or manufacturer. We’re also keen to hire someone with strong analytical, problem solving and communication skills.

In order to fit the bill, it's really important that you can back yourself with some great examples from the checklist below:

• A food or science/engineering degree

• Previous experience in a food/drinks technical role, being accountable for quality, food safety, legality and sustainability of either raw materials or finished products (if you’ve already cut your teeth in the chilled juice sector that would be the cherry on top).

• Solid HACCP knowledge and Risk Management skills

• Strong organisational skills and critical thinking - experience dealing with different and conflicting priorities would be ideal

• Strong analytical and problem solving skills - we work with a lot of numbers, so you’ll need to be comfortable manipulating and analysing data in our systems, including Excel

• Clear communicator - ability to translate complex things into a simple and clear messages for a variety of stakeholders

you'll get

We’ve got big ambitions over the next few years, delivering market-leading growth from smoothie, juice and refreshment– so it’s an exciting time to be joining innocent, and you’ll have a crucial role to play in delivering these plans.

Fruit Towers in West London, but there may be times when you’ll need to travel further afield. Therefore, we’ll need someone who’s game for getting on a plane (or train) every now and again.

If you think you have everything we're looking for and more, then we'd love to hear from you. You'll need to get your skates on though, as applications close soon.

Dolly Parton may have worked Nine to Five but you don't have to. We're all about being healthy and happy here at innocent so we're open to a chat about flexible working. No promises, but we reckon that if it's good for you, then it's good for us. 

No agencies please.