Quality Assurance Technician
Summary
Quality Assurance Technician at a food manufacturing facility, spending most of the time on the production floor monitoring food safety, sanitation, label accuracy, and quality standards. Core work involves USDA testing, Listeria swab programs, temperature/weight checks, and stopping operations when food or personnel safety issues arise.
Reports to Operations Quality Assurance Manager
Job Summary:
To effectively maintain food safety according to government regulations and company standards and quality standards according to company specifications.
Office Environment: 19% of the work is conducted in an office setting, involving time spent on computer research, project management, and communication with team members and stakeholders. Frequent participation in both in-person and virtual meetings, including project updates, strategy sessions, and presentations to management and stakeholders.
Production Environment: 80% Regular visits to the production areas will involve exposure to machinery, noise, varying temperatures, humidity, and wet conditions.
Travel: <1% Occasional travel for training, meetings, conferences, etc.
Schedule: Flexible schedule, including evenings, weekends, and holidays as needed based on operational requirements.
Key Responsibilities:
- Monitors packing weights, temperatures, label checks, sanitation, foreign material, code date, piece counts, and other line quality checks.
- Maintain quality and ensure food safety. Work with monitoring employees to improve accuracy and reliability.
- Monitors employee hygiene and sanitary practices. Daily work with employees and supervisors’ online sanitation performances and employee personal habits on the floor.
- Work in the lab on sample collections and assist when needed in shipment preparations.
- Tag product or equipment to be retained or to cease operation when necessary.
- Stop any operation within the facility that presents quality, food safety, or personnel safety issue.
- Monitor proper specifications for products being produced and run label checks for specified materials, packaging, and label approvals.
- Monitor facility inspection and operations.
- Monitors traffic flow of equipment and employees. Look for incidences of possible cross-contamination and sanitation record keeping.
- Complete Listeria swabs on environmental and product contact. Understand the need for the program.
- Monitor USDA testing and QA Retain all products that are tested from the day of production.
- Load, retrieve, and report temperature probes for smokehouse temperature balancing.