Job Description

Job opportunity: Customer Technical Manager (12 months maternity cover)

Role: full time, permanent

Working Pattern: Hybrid with flexibility for travel to our customers

Location: Vitacress Herbs, Lagness Road, Runcton, Chichester PO20 1LJ

Salary: Competitive dependant on experience, with eligibility for incentive scheme, company pension and private medical insurance

Are you passionate about food safety, quality, and building strong customer relationships? Do you enjoy leading technical improvements, solving challenges, and delivering exceptional service in a fast-paced food manufacturing environment? Are you looking for an opportunity to make a real impact with a business that values safety, quality, service, and continuous improvement?

We're looking for a customer-focused Customer Technical Manager to join our Technical team at Vitacress Herbs. This is an exciting opportunity to act as the key technical contact for our customers, ensuring the highest standards of quality and food safety while driving continuous improvement across the business.

In this role, you'll...

• Act as the primary technical contact for key customers, managing audits, visits, complaints, product launches, and performance reviews.
• Lead customer complaint investigations, providing timely root cause analysis, corrective actions, and ongoing communication.
• Create, coordinate, and deliver customer technical improvement plans, ensuring projects are successfully implemented across site.
• Manage customer communications relating to incidents, recalls, withdrawals, and non-routine microbiological issues.
• Generate, analyse, and present weekly, periodic, and quarterly KPI reports, complaint trends, and continuous improvement updates.
• Support new product launches, specification management, supplier approval processes, benchmarking activities, and key business improvement initiatives.

You can do this if you have...

• Experience in a food industry technical management role with responsibility for customer-facing relationships.
• Strong knowledge of BRCGS Standards, food legislation, HACCP principles, and customer codes of practice.
• Experience preparing for and hosting customer audits, third-party audits, and BRC audits.
• A degree in a food-related discipline (or equivalent industry experience), along with HACCP and Food Hygiene qualifications.
• Excellent communication, organisational, and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to influence across departments.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, supported by competent IT and reporting capabilities.

You'll do this for us...

• Champion Vitacress values by promoting the highest standards of food safety, quality, service, and continuous improvement.
• Build trusted relationships with customers, becoming a key partner in delivering technical excellence and customer satisfaction.
• Drive complaint reduction initiatives and implement preventative actions that improve product quality and customer experience.
• Ensure customer requirements, specifications, and codes of practice are fully understood and embedded within site operations.
• Collaborate with production, technical, procurement, and NPD teams to deliver successful customer and business improvement projects.
• Support the continued growth of the business through robust supplier management, technical expertise, and a passion for excellence.

Vitacress Herbs, based just outside historic Chichester, West Sussex, is a primary supplier of Herb and horticulture products in the UK. With our 23-acre site covered in specialist glass houses, we take immense pride in our work ensuring our consumers have a fresh, quality product to enhance their home cooking or enhance their garden environment. We take pleasure in ensuring the best possible standards and we will empower you to do the same. From the way we grow our products, to the relationships we maintain with customers, everyone knows exactly what is going on. We are authentic and grounded. At the centre of everything is a trust that you can feel every day at work. From the herbs that are grown on site; to the investment in facilities and the growth of the business; to growing and nurturing out talented employees, growing is truly at the heart of what we do. Join us and become a trusted partner in our business.