What You’ll Be Serving Up:
You will play a critical role in guaranteeing the quality and safety of KFC’s food sourcing, ensuring our products always meet the highest standards, in line with KFC’s specifications and requirements. Your mission will be to safeguard our customers and our brand by ensuring compliance with all Yum! Global Food Safety and Quality standards, facilitating issue resolution, expertly handling crisis communications, and maintaining the team’s training and proficiency. The position assures safe, high-quality products and quality processes by establishing and enforcing food safety and quality standards, managing supplier relationships, conducting product testing, and maintaining product specifications and Quality Assurance Programs.
Here’s How You’ll Spice Things Up:
- Manages performance, development, and workload for Supplier FSQA team
- Manages relationships with ingredient suppliers, leads product improvement projects, partners with suppliers to resolve product issues, and ensures the implementation of corrective actions.
- Serves as KFC Fresh Produce Expert, ensuring compliance with Yum Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) and food safety standards.
- Leads Supplier Approval Process (including detailed risk assessments) and monitors existing supplier performance by ensuring audit compliance, identifying product quality trends, and ensuring root cause analysis is conducted along with the implementation of corrective actions.
- Leads QA support on Crisis Management Team for any product issues/withdrawals and presents findings/updates to KFC leadership.
- Ensures product specifications meet all regulatory guidelines and are current, accurate, and meet product design requirements.
- Manages QA/Commercialization sensory evaluation program in support of supplier approvals and ongoing product sensory and lab evaluations.
- Leads supplier summits, technical councils/workshops, and working groups for suppliers to continuously evaluate and update processes, driving quality and food safety improvements.
- Ability to travel approximately 25%-40% of time.
What You Bring to the Table:
- Education:
- Bachelor of Science in Food Science, Animal Science or related science field. Masters of Science preferred.
- Certified Quality Auditor (ASQ) and/or equivalent certification/auditing experience preferred
- Experience:
- Minimum 5 years of experience in restaurant support or supplier quality assurance role
- Prior experience in the food industry, specifically QSR,andproduce commodities, preferred.
- Skills:
- Must be able to anticipate and identify potential challenges and recommend course of action to resolve.
- Problem solving and documentation skills to ensure appropriate investigation with documented resolution of issues with high sense of urgency.
- Understands partnership culture with ability to build strong relationships both internally and externally.
- Strong team player that contributes to a positive and productive team environment; able to build strong relationships with teammates and stakeholders to deliver on day-to-day mission.
- Excellent oral and written communication skills with the ability to present effectively.
- Strong analytical skills to gather, analyze, and interpret data.
- Strong organizational skills to manage workload and schedules effectively.
- Mindset:
- Relentless in the pursuit of excellence and maintaining high standards.
- Resourceful and adaptive in ambiguous situations with a proven ability to operate “in the grey.”
- Resilient in the face of obstacles and persistent in driving towards results.
- Thrive in a collaborative environment.
What's In It For You:
- Ensure food safety excellence by leading critical initiatives that uphold KFC’s commitment to delivering high-quality, safe products to millions of customers.
- Expand your expertise and leadership by collaborating with industry-leading suppliers, training teams on food safety protocols, and driving continuous improvement across the system.
- Gain cross-functional visibility by working with Operations, Legal, Training, and Supply Chain teams to influence quality and compliance strategies.
- Be part of a world-class brand that prioritizes innovation, operational excellence, and an unwavering commitment to food safety and quality.
About Us
KFC Corporation, based in Plano, Texas, is one of the few brands in America that can boast about having a rich, 60-year history of success and innovation. In fact, KFC is the world's most popular chicken restaurant chain and a division of Yum! Brands, the world’s largest restaurant company.
Yum! Brands, Inc., based in Louisville, Kentucky, has over 45,000 restaurants in more than 135 countries and territories and is one of the Aon Hewitt Top Companies for Leaders in North America. In 2018, Yum! Brands was recognized as part of the inaugural Bloomberg Gender-Equality Index. The company’s restaurant brands – KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell – are global leaders of the chicken, pizza and Mexican-style food categories.
More important than our size is our commitment to breakthrough innovation and the success of our employees. We're proud of the unique culture we've built, one where everyone can be their best self, make a difference and have fun! We believe in our people, trust in their positive intentions, encourage ideas from everyone, and have actively developed a workforce that is diverse in style and background.
