Director of Procurement

Key Responsibilities Strategic Sourcing & Cost Management Develop and execute sourcing strategies to ensure a consistent supply of ingredients, commodities, packaging, and other key spending categories.Manage the end-to-end procurement process; lead supplier negotiations, competitive bids, contracts, and commercial terms.Deliver measurable cost savings, cost avoidance, value engineering, and specification optimization.Monitor commodity and ingredient markets and provide forward-looking visibility to cost and supply changes.

Supplier Management & Supply Assurance: Identify and evaluate potential suppliers, develop a high-performing supplier base that meets cost, quality, service, food-safety, and capacity requirements.Build and maintain strong and strategic supplier relationships that provide access to innovation, market intelligence, capacity, and continuous improvement.Establish supplier scorecards and conduct regular business reviews with strategic suppliers.Identify supply risks and implement dual-source, alternative-source, and contingency strategies for critical materials.

Planning, S&OP, Inventory & Innovation: Work closely with other departments, including Operations and Planning, Commercial, R&D, QA and Finance, to align procurement activities with business objectives.Participate actively in S&OP, translating demand and production requirements into effective procurement plans.Partner with Planning and Operations to ensure material availability while optimizing inventory and working capital.Work with R&D and Commercial teams on new business, new products, reformulations, cost improvements, and commercialization.Engage suppliers as innovation partners to identify improved ingredients, packaging, processes, and technologies.Manage supplier lead times, MOQs, safety stocks, and purchasing parameters.Identify and reduce excess and obsolete raw material and packaging inventory.

Quality, Food Safety & Innovation Partner with Quality to ensure suppliers meet company, customer, regulatory, and food-safety requirements.Support supplier qualification, audits, specifications, corrective actions, and change-control processes.

Procurement Excellence Establish effective procurement policies, processes, approval controls, and sourcing disciplines.Leverage technology and data analytics to enhance procurement decision-making and reporting.Improve ERP/master-data accuracy and purchasing controls.Develop reporting and dashboards covering spending, savings, supplier performance, commodity exposure, inventory, and supply risk.Continuously improve procurement processes, analytics, and organizational capabilities.

Leadership Lead, coach, and develop the procurement/purchasing team.

Set clear goals, responsibilities, performance expectations and accountability, and provide regular feedback and development opportunities.

Develop the organization from transactional purchasing toward strategic category and supplier management.

Build strong cross-functional relatio...