Process Specialist

Title: Thermal Process Specialist

Location: Janesville, WI

Reports to: Senior Quality Manager

Company Overview

NaturPak is a rapidly growing, vertically integrated food and ingredient manufacturer specializing in retort packaged meals and broths, pet nutrition, and functional food ingredients. The company operates two advanced manufacturing facilities in Janesville, Wisconsin, including a state-of-the-art Tetra Pak Recart platform and a growing ingredient and R&D operation.


Position Overview:

The thermal process specialist focuses on ensuring that thermal processing operations are safe, compliant, efficient, and capable of producing high-quality products and also develops, validates, and optimizes thermal processing systems to ensure food safety, regulatory compliance, product quality, and manufacturing efficiency across commercial food production operations.

Description and Responsibilities

• Supervising retort processes rerpoting to SQM
• Keep up with calibration for retort related equipment.
• Review thermal process records
• Escalate deviation and unusual occurrence and work on root cause analysis with SQM
• Assisting with Temperature distribution study
• Asisting with RD team with heat penetration
• Schedule retort PM with maintenance department
• Controling the retort cleaning process
• Work on a cross-functional team to establish and implement a customized formal training program for retort operators
• Assist in filing scheduled processes with the FDA in accordance with the Code of Federal Regulations
• Help maintain the Thermal Processing Schedule for all company products
• Conduct routine reviews of Processing Data and assist in handling and disposition of processing deviations

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Food Science, Food Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Microbiology, or a related scientific field.
• Experience
• 3-10+ years of experience in food manufacturing, food processing, quality assurance, process engineering, or thermal processing.
• Experience with retort, aseptic, pasteurization, or sterilization systems.
• Experience conducting process validations and scientific studies.
• Knowledge of commercial food production environments and continuous improvement practices.
• Knowledge of process validation and verification, HACCP and preventive controls, Food safety regulations and compliance requirements, Statistical analysis and data interpretation and packaging interactions with thermal processing