Head of Optimization for Cheese Processing Plants (m/f/d)

Your responsibilities:

• You take overall responsibility for product and process optimization across four plants where we grate, slice and process cheese and where applicable their vegan alternatives.
• You develop and lead the optimization organization with five functional leads and their respective teams, while setting strategic priorities, steering major optimization and scale-up initiatives.
• Aligned with business priorities, you define and drive optimization strategies that deliver measurable improvements in cost, quality, yield and efficiency.
• Best practices and cross-plant synergies are leveraged to accelerate performance improvements and scale proven solutions across all production sites within the Hochland group.
• You are the first point of contact to check the technological feasibility to produce new products and variants on the respective sites.
• Close collaboration with R&D, Quality Management, Procurement, SCM and Engineering enables innovation, cross-functional alignment, product standardization and effective escalation support.

Your recipe to success:

• You bring strong leadership experience in multi-site production environments, ideally combined with relevant expertise in dairy technology, particularly processed cheese.
• A proven track record in transformation and performance improvement, paired with strong stakeholder management at corporate and plant level, enables you to drive sustainable change.
• Fluent English is essential to lead effective communication and collaboration across the organization.
• You are willing to travel across Europe for up to 25% of your time.
• Strategic thinking, strong execution capabilities, and sound decision-making allow you to turn business priorities into tangible results.
• You combine strong business acumen with experience in organizational development to drive successful transformation.