Plant Manager - Food Manufacturing

About The Role

This role provides overall operational leadership for a food manufacturing facility producing extruded, agglomerated, powdered, and granular food products, with responsibility for safety, quality, financial performance, and continuous improvement. The Plant Manager sets both short-term tactical plans and long-term strategic direction for the site, ensuring efficient, safe, and compliant operations while aligning with corporate strategy and growth objectives. The ideal candidate brings strong experience managing complex, regulated manufacturing environments and leading diverse leadership teams across multiple departments.

What You'll Do

• Oversee day-to-day operations across the facility, ensuring consistent performance, operational discipline, and delivery of customer commitments, while developing and executing site-level strategies aligned with production, quality, cost, and service goals
• Establish standardized operating practices, performance metrics, and governance across the plant, and ensure production plans meet customer demand while optimizing throughput, yield, and asset utilization
• Champion a strong safety culture in line with OSHA, EPA, and process safety management (PSM) requirements, overseeing materials handling, dust control, waste management, and environmental stewardship programs
• Lead audits, inspections, and corrective action plans related to safety, quality, and regulatory compliance, and maintain a safe working environment through consistent enforcement of safety policies and regular audits
• Directly lead the site leadership team, building leadership capability through coaching, performance management, and succession planning, and foster collaboration across Operations, EHS, Quality, Engineering, Supply Chain, and HR to promote accountability and continuous improvement
• Oversee reliability and preventive and predictive maintenance strategies, manage aging assets and spare parts planning, and partner with Engineering on plant upgrades, expansions, debottlenecking, and automation projects
• Lead Lean Manufacturing, Six Sigma, or Operational Excellence initiatives across the site, drive standardization of systems and reporting, and lead change management initiatives to support growth and transformation, ensuring lessons from quality and customer performance gaps are institutionalized into plant practices
• Drive productivity improvements and cost reduction initiatives, including effective use of staffing, without compromising safety or quality, and support strategic initiatives such as plant expansions, new product introductions, and process optimization

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Chemistry, Food Science, Manufacturing, or a related field
• 6 to 12+ years of progressive manufacturing or processing leadership experience in food manufacturing
• Experience leading food-regulated environments with strong safety initiatives
• Demonstrated success managing multiple complex manufacturing departments
• Deep understanding of employee and food safety, quality systems, and regulatory requirements
• Proven financial and operational acumen, including cost management

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with asset-intensive operations, R&D production coordination, and reliability-focused maintenance strategies
• Lean Manufacturing, Six Sigma, or Operational Excellence certification or training

Pay

$150,000 to $180,000 annually, depending on experience.

Schedule

Full-time, on-site in Austin, Minnesota.

Benefits

Full benefits package.