Job Purpose:
- The Sanitation Operations Manager is responsible for leading and continuously improving the site’s sanitation and hygiene operations to ensure the facility consistently meets the highest standards of food safety, product quality, regulatory compliance, customer requirements, and operational performance.
- This role provides strategic and day-to-day leadership for all sanitation activities, including sanitation programs, SSOPs, sanitation scheduling, chemical management, allergen control, environmental hygiene, sanitation validation, employee training, and continuous improvement. The Sanitation Operations Manager works closely with Production, Quality, Maintenance, Engineering, and Warehouse teams to ensure sanitation requirements are fully integrated into the operation and that the facility is maintained in a safe, hygienic, and audit-ready condition.
- The role is accountable for developing a high-performing sanitation culture, establishing clear standards and expectations, optimizing sanitation processes and resources, and using data and root-cause analysis to eliminate recurring sanitation and hygiene issues.
Essential Duties and Responsibilities:
- Lead all sanitation operations across the manufacturing facility, ensuring production areas, equipment, utilities, and supporting spaces are maintained to established food-safety and hygiene standards.
- Develop, implement, and maintain sanitation programs, SSOPs, and work instructions that meet regulatory, customer, GFSI, and company requirements.
- Own the sanitation master schedule, coordinating sanitation activities with Production and Maintenance to optimize equipment availability, changeovers, downtime, and production requirements.
- Establish and enforce sanitation standards for equipment, production rooms, floors, drains, ceilings, walls, conveyors, processing systems, and other facility infrastructure.
- Lead sanitation personnel and supervisors, establishing clear expectations for performance, accountability, attendance, safety, and professional conduct.
- Build a high-performance sanitation culture through coaching, training, communication, recognition, and continuous improvement.
- Manage sanitation staffing and labor utilization, ensuring appropriate resources are available to meet operational requirements while controlling labor costs.
- Manage sanitation chemicals, equipment, tools, and supplies, including purchasing, inventory control, proper storage, concentration, application, and associated documentation.
- Ensure effective allergen control through sanitation, including validated cleaning procedures, changeover requirements, verification activities, and prevention of cross-contact.
- Partner with Quality/Food Safety to establish sanitation verification and validation programs, including ATP, microbiological, allergen, environmental, and visual inspection activities as applicable.
- Analyze sanitation and environmental monitoring results to identify trends, recurring issues, and opportunities for corrective and preventive action.
- Lead root-cause analysis and corrective actions for sanitation deficiencies, environmental monitoring failures, audit findings, customer complaints, and recurring hygiene issues.
- Coordinate closely with Maintenance and Engineering to address equipment design, hygienic design, accessibility, drainage, repairs, and modifications that affect sanitation effectiveness.
- Ensure sanitation-related regulatory, customer, and third-party audit readiness, maintaining accurate records and ensuring deficiencies are promptly addressed.
- Develop and manage sanitation KPIs, such as sanitation compliance, sanitation downtime, labor efficiency, chemical usage, verification results, repeat deficiencies, corrective-action closure, and audit performance.
- Drive continuous improvement and cost reduction through improved cleaning methods, equipment, automation, chemical optimization, labor practices, and process standardization.
- Ensure all sanitation activities are performed safely, including proper chemical handling, PPE use, lockout/tagout requirements, equipment access, confined-space considerations, and employee safety practices.
- Manage and oversee sanitation contractors and service providers, ensuring they meet site standards for pest control, specialized cleaning, waste handling, equipment cleaning, and other sanitation-related services.
- Maintain complete and accurate sanitation documentation and records, ensuring records are timely, traceable, reviewed, and readily available for audits and investigations.
- Serve as a member of the site leadership team, collaborating with Production, Quality, Maintenance, Engineering, Warehouse, and other functions to balance food safety, quality, people, service, cost, and operational performance.
Salary Range from $80,000 to $95,000
Blommer Chocolate Company provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation and training.
