How You’ll Spend Your Time at Tovala

• Responsible for developing food and packaging procurement strategy that’s aligned with overall company goals and objectives
• Effectively manage and guide a team of buyers across multiple facilities and specialties, focussing on their professional development and opportunities for growth
• Lead food and packaging purchasing processes from end to end - create and refine tools that align demand for materials with production and sales forecasts
• Manage and refine procurement process to improve quality, reduce waste, and limit other related costs such as freight and storage.
• Partner with Finance to ensure costs are within goal and report and explain variances as needed, lead the annual planning process on these components and reforecast as needed. Comfortable with diving into details of costs and working cross functionally on reconciliation. 
• Lead negotiations for contracts to mitigate volatility in pricing and other market conditions
• Secure secondary and tertiary options for all key ingredients and packaging to mitigate interruptions of production due to shortages or quality issue and ensure competitive pricing
• Maintain and improve a vendor onboarding process, ongoing approval process reviews to ensure product specifications, terminate and change vendors as needed
• Implement and execute a vendor performance rating system
• Create metrics as required to monitor and evaluate vendor performance. to key attributes (on-time/ complete delivery, adherence to specifications, accurate pricing, etc)
• Collaborate with R&D, menu and culinary teams on new procurement; once agreed to, ensuring that timeline deliverables for sourcing products can be met
• Respond to requests and identify improvement opportunities from the production team, as an internal customer, and provide solutions and efficiencies to allow them to succeed.

About You

• 8+ years in a food procurement role, experience with meal kits or prepared meal industry or managing a large portfolio of ingredients with changing menus preferred
• 4+ years effectively managing a team and coaching team members for significant career development
• Familiarity with food packaging required, specific experience with packaging procurement is a plus
• Excellent time management skills and strong follow-through and follow-up skills, supported by professional references
• Ability to think and act critically about processes and supply chain systems with a focus on continuous improvement and staying ahead of market trends
• Ability to collaborate, challenge and find solutions when working cross-functionally with other teams - a can do attitude and an ability to accept and drive change
• Strong project management, problem solving and planning skills
• Strong verbal and written communication skills- Bachelor’s degree in Logistics, Supply Chain, Food Science or related field preferred
• Ability to use MSOffice, Google Suites (Drive, Sheets, Docs, etc.) to create useful and transparent electronic tools for demand planning on materials and packaging
• Familiarity with NetSuite is a plus.