Manager, Quality Assurance

Manager, Quality Assurance

In this role, you'll lead Quality for Torani's syrup operations supporting and developing a team of QA Engineers and Technicians while working side-by-side with partners across Manufacturing, Maintenance, Engineering, Warehouse and Planning. You bring a strong foundation in food safety and quality, paired with an operational mindset that helps teams do the right thing every day. Through collaboration, coaching, and clear expectations, you help Quality show up as a trusted partner on the floor, not just a checkpoint.

As a Quality Assurance Manager, you'll play a key role in turning quality strategy into day-to-day practice. You'll reinforce strong execution of food safety and quality programs, build confidence and capability within your team, and help create routines that make quality part of how work gets done. Your steady leadership, curiosity, and commitment to continuous improvement will help protect the Torani brand while supporting a culture where teams feel ownership, pride, and shared responsibility for quality outcomes.

At Torani, a Certified B Corporation, we flavor more than just drinks, we flavor lives. You'll join a people-first, purpose-driven organization that values collaboration, learning, and doing the right thing. As we continue to grow and evolve, you'll help ensure our syrup operation delivers the same safe, consistent, high-quality flavor our customers expect every time.

Success Factors (First 12-24 Months)

• Quality Execution & Operational Excellence: You elevated how Quality shows up in the syrup operation by grounding food safety and quality expectations in the realities of day-to-day work. With a strong understanding of processing, packaging, warehousing, inventory flow, and WMS-driven workflows, you translated standards into disciplined, repeatable routines teams could execute consistently. Rather than relying on oversight alone, you strengthened daily operating rhythms, clarified decision paths, and coached your team to apply sound judgment in real time. Quality became embedded in how work was planned, executed, and reviewed-supporting throughput, reliability, and service while safeguarding product integrity.
• Food Safety & Risk Leadership : You strengthened Torani's food safety foundation by creating, maintaining, and continuously improving food safety plans for the syrup operation. In close partnership with the QA Compliance Manager, you championed strong execution of SQF-aligned programs on the floor, ensuring HACCP controls, GMPs, prerequisite programs, sanitation validation, allergen controls were not only followed, but understood. You led complex investigations and customer complaint responses with rigor and clarity, guiding teams through root cause analysis and corrective actions that addressed system gaps and elevated behaviors. Food safety shifted from reactive compliance to proactive risk management under your leadership.
• Team Leadership & Capability Building: You built a high-performing QA team by developing capability, confidence, and ownership at every level. Through intentional coaching, clear expectations, and continuous feedback, you grew technical depth across the team while strengthening their ability to think critically and act independently. Over time, your team became trusted facilitators of learning and problem-solving, able to guide conversations, surface risk, and support decisions across the operation. Your leadership reduced dependency on escalation and created a team that consistently raised the standard for quality thinking on the floor.
• Integrated Partnership: You strengthened the connection between Quality, Manufacturing, and Warehouse Operations by deeply understanding what mattered most to each group-and helping teams navigate priorities together. You partnered effectively with Planning, Distribution, and 3PL partners, bringing quality expectations into inventory management, storage, handling, and shipment practices. By understanding how material movement and WMS processes interact with quality controls, you ensured quality requirements were reinforced beyond the production line. Collaboration felt natural and productive because quality decisions supported both compliance and operational success end-to-end.
• Continuous Improvement & Change Enablement: You helped translate strategic quality priorities into sustained improvements by guiding teams through change with clarity and discipline. Partnering across functions, you supported and co-facilitated problem-solving efforts, corrective action follow-up, and continuous improvement activities that address root causes, not symptoms. You used data from process checks, lab results, deviations, warehouse findings, and complaints to identify patterns and inform better decisions. As processes, equipment, and systems evolved, you ensured improvements were documented, reinforced, and built into daily routines-so progress lasted.

What You'll Bring (Qualifications)

• Bachelor's degree in Food Science, Chemistry, Biology, Engineering, or a related technical discipline (or equivalent experience).
• 5+ years of QA experience in food or beverage manufacturing, including food safety systems and leading/developing QA teams.
• Strong working knowledge of food safety programs such as HACCP, GMPs, prerequisite programs, sanitation validation (CIP/COP), allergen control, and environmental monitoring.
• Experience championing execution of GFSI-aligned programs (e.g., SQF) in partnership with compliance or regulatory-focused roles, ensuring expectations are well understood and consistently applied on the floor.
• Proven ability to lead investigations related to deviations, food safety incidents, and customer complaints, including root cause analysis and corrective/preventive action development.
• Experience using data to drive decisions, including analysis of process checks, lab results, trends, and KPIs to identify risk and improvement opportunities.
• Strong Excel or spreadsheet skills (VLOOKUPs, filters, pivot tables, data cleanup).
• Ability to follow food safety, safety, and GMP expectations and maintain accurate documentation.

Why People Love Working Here

Why Torani

• Become an owner: Every regular team member participates in Torani's Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP), giving you the opportunity to share in the long-term success you're helping create. Profit Sharing, an annual bonus, and a 401(k) company match are just a few of the additional ways we celebrate and reward that success together.
• Growing with purpose: For more than 35 years, Torani has grown year after year. That growth creates opportunities to build new skills, work with new technologies, and take on new challenges to keep building our business.
• Better together: We work across teams, solve problems together, and support one another through both successes and setbacks.

More to Love

• Healthcare that's fully covered: We pay 100% of medical, dental, and vision premiums for our team members.
• Celebrate together: From Company Day and cultural heritage celebrations to team lunches and milestone celebrations, we make time to connect and celebrate.
• The perks are pretty delicious: Enjoy unlimited Italian sodas, flavored lattes, and plenty of opportunities to taste the products we're creating together.
• And, of course, the essentials: Competitive pay, paid time off, and a comprehensive benefits package to support you.

Work Location: San Leandro, 5 days on site at Toraniland: Flavor Factory.

Salary Range: $116,126 - $129,029