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

Your responsibilities:

• You take overall responsibility for product and process optimization across four plants where we produce Cream Cheese, Cottage Cheese, White Cheese, Soft Cheeses, other natural cheeses and where applicable their vegan alternatives.
• You develop and lead the optimization organization with four 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 cream cheese, cottage cheese, white cheese and soft 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.