Staff Specialist, Quality

Location: Hershey, PA

About the role

At The Hershey Company, our culture is rooted in purpose and inspired by Milton Hershey’s enduring vision that business should create opportunity for others. Through our commitment to corporate philanthropy, we create positive impact by supporting communities, helping children thrive, and operating as a business for good. This includes our deep and long standing partnership with Milton Hershey School, where we invest in education, workforce readiness, and hands on engagement to help students succeed beyond the classroom. Supported by strategic grantmaking, product donations, cross brand collaboration, and strong employee volunteerism, Hershey offers a place to work where making a difference—locally and globally—is part of how we do business every day.

Lead operations for the integration of quality and food safety of newly acquired business (M&A), including assessment of sites utilizing Hershey Product Excellence Program, continuous improvement, new products, executing supply chain strategy, and leading supply chain integration.

Responsibilities

• Implement quality systems and programs to ensure company quality, food safety and regulatory standards are consistently achieved.
• Provide training programs, auditing of quality systems, complex troubleshooting and large-scale incident management.
• Develop and implement training programs to assure compliance and understanding of internal quality expectations and regulatory compliance.
• Provide mentoring to quality team members in manufacturing.
• Coach manufacturing plants on audit needs, assist with quality systems audits across Supply Chain.
• Provide recommendations and develop corrective and preventative action plans to ensure compliance standards are met.
• Direct troubleshooting incidents of high complexity with potential large financial or regulatory impacts.
• Manage product holds and facilitate root cause analysis.
• Partner with cross-functional groups (Manufacturing, Marketing, Legal, etc.) and external business partners to ensure communications and action plans are established.
• Serve as liaison for domestic and international regulatory agencies to manage product recalls, withdrawals, and recovery.
• Act as a QA representative on cross-functional project teams, complex assignments and engineering projects including new manufacturing lines.
• Coordinate new product efforts from initial test runs to full-scale production to assure integrity of systems.
• Lead and implement food safety and quality systems for new products/new manufacturing lines at Hershey plants to meet company and regulatory requirements.
• Serve as a Subject Matter Expert for FDA Regulations, Global Food Safety Initiative, Data Management/Trending, Processing, Packaging, Environmental, Net Weight, Recipe Management, etc.
• Facilitate process/procedure improvement sessions related to incident management, serious product quality issues, and overall quality system improvements.
• Coach quality managers on specific issues.
• Travel 50% of work time domestically for consulting, auditing, training and development of quality managers and teams.

Requirements

• Education: Bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering, food engineering/manufacturing or a related technical/engineering field plus three years of food manufacturing industry experience.
• Experience: Experience must include the following (but need not extend over the full period of required experience): Knowledge of federal and state food industry regulations including Food Safety Modernization Act, HACCP, Food Safety Standards.

Benefits

• Health & Wellbeing: Medical, dental, and vision coverage, plus wellness programs that support your physical and mental health
• Financial Security: Competitive pay, annual incentive opportunities, and a 401(k) with company match
• Time Off & Flexibility: Paid time off, company holidays, and flexible ways of working where applicable
• Growth & Development: Career development programs, learning opportunities, and internal mobility
• Benefits may vary based on role, location, and eligibility.

Pay

The anticipated base salary range for this role is $93