Want to help us bring happiness to the world? Want to join an ambitious and fast growing global biscuits and confectionery business investing heavily in iconic global brands, infrastructure and people? Then this is the place for you.

As proud bakers and chocolatiers and custodians of iconic global brands, we don’t compromise on the quality of ingredients in our products or on the people we hire. We are looking for entrepreneurial spirits who share our passion for bringing happiness to our consumers and who embody our Winning Traits.

To succeed at pladis you need to be purpose-led, resilient and positive to succeed here because we expect pace and agility, we insist on collaboration and demand accountability. If that is your thing, then pladis offers global ambition, a clear Vision and roadmap for success, challenge, and unrivalled opportunities to learn and make an impact

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pladis operates in highly competitive, fast moving markets where it is essential to maintain and extend market share through profitable branded growth.  Successful innovation through product development, continuous value improvement and consumer perceived quality superiority vs. the competition are critical. 

This Senior Packaging Engineer role is responsible for the development and delivery of a new technology capability for pladis that will be critical for unlocking new and differentiating innovation across our packaging portfolio and for driving sustainability initiatives to meet our global packaging targets and agenda.

Innovation through product and packaging development, continuous value improvement and consumer perceived Quality superiority vs. competition are critical and key to delivering the business targets. The role is key in developing and delivering the packaging growth plan for pladis with a specific focus on incremental growth through Packaging. This can be in the form of asset driven innovation and/ or new technology. Experience in leading multi-site Packaging programmes and teams are essential, also experience in leading packaging material capabilities will be desirable as excellent knowledge in sustainable development practices specifically for packaging. 

The role holder will be expected to lead packaging related agenda across multiple sites in UK and Europe. Would need to interface with both the SC and MKT stakeholders and communicate and influence packaging programme both to technical and non-technical audiences with associated business cases and an end to end thinking.  

The role also will require to translate insights into finished Packaging solutions that are Business/ Brand/ Shopper/ Consumer

Driven and Design/ Technology led. Excellent Project Leadership and Stakeholder Management skills are critical to success. 

The role requires an individual adept at multi-cultural cross-functional collaboration and who can work effectively with multiple external partners to identify appropriate routes to drive development of innovative packaging solutions.  The role requires the incumbent to create a technology development a clear purposeful agenda navigating the ambiguity and uncertainty typical of early stage discovery projects.

The ideal candidate will have well developed core packaging development technical skills, and be able to understand the needs of the business, our consumers & customers, and translate to the needs of the project to ensure relevance to our business and brands.  The incumbent will be an intellectually agile and curious self-starter with a drive for action and results.  You will have a proven ability to learn new technical understand and rapidly re-apply that understanding into tangible, practical progress and results.   

pladis organization model is based on 8 regions with full accountability of their own P&L

• Global
• UK & Ireland
• Europe & Emerging Markets (EEM)
• Turkey, Central Asia (TRCA)
• Middle East, North Africa (MENA)
• North America (Nam)
• Asia pacific (APAC)
• Godiva (Global)

A few global functions, supporting all regions to leverage size, expertise and best practices developing new solutions to accelerate our growth particularly through the development and implementation of new technologies that address unmet consumer needs.

Global R&D works hand in hand on many initiatives with partners in the other functions (both globally and within regions) to create strong competitive advantages for pladis including:

• Packaging Innovation
• Portfolio transformation
• Sustainability (i.e. environment-friendly initiatives)
• Transformational Productivity

The position will report directly within R&D to the position of Global Director, Breakthrough Packaging.  It is expected that the incumbent will work very closely with their counterparts across R&D and with external partners (suppliers / research institutes / consumer trend agencies)  to effectively delivery their agenda, initially as a discovery project, and thereafter into development and commercialisation phases of the innovation project lifecycle.

The Senior Packaging Engineer’s key responsibilities include:

• Supporting in defining and delivering a medium to long term roadmap and aligning an agenda to drive sustainability and productivity – helping to build internal cross-functional expertise and relationships to deliver that agenda.
• Supporting the Global Packaging team (Procurement) to build strong and mid-term Sourcing Strategies.
• Building collaborative relationships with Suppliers to capture the best practices on the market and monitor project implementation.
• It is expected that this position will spend roughly 75% of his / her time to drive Packaging innovation & productivity & expertise and 25% to monitor and implement the Packaging sustainability roadmap.

The key responsibilities include:

• Sustainable packaging
• Supporting in defining and developing the Packaging sustainability roadmap for pladis
• Supporting to embed this roadmap within the Packaging Category Sourcing Strategies to ensure full implementation of those initiatives.
• Working closely with regional R&D teams around our sustainability roadmap while monitoring progress in every region.
• Delivering regular sustainability workshops with our key suppliers to enrich our sustainability roadmap and follow the evolution of technologies and regulations across pladis geographies
• Creating reports to demonstrate the progress made on our sustainable packaging roadmap.
• Productivity
• Contribute to the elaboration of the Category Sourcing Strategy with regards to Materials Productivity, developing a strong pipeline of reformulation / rationalisation projects over a rolling 2 year-forward period.
• Participate to regular productivity workshops with factories and also our suppliers to enrich our 2-year pipeline
• Monitor the technical implementation of this roadmap, support local R&D or factories when there is a gap of expertise to ensure projects are delivered on time.
• Build thought leadership & best practice
• Manage projects and project guidelines for worldwide projects (i.e. materials to be tested, max. gauge reduction to be considered depending on the manufacturing technology / material type…) and share best practices between factories about the technical implementation of worldwide projects.
• Contribute to the on-going development of the methodology to approve Packaging suppliers and materials (documentations, sampling and testing protocols, approval range etc.) across pladis to ensure consistency and performance.
• Build and maintain a strong external network of partners, collaborators, consultants etc. to drive the packaging agenda using robust OI approaches

​Expertise

• Support to build and formalise an academy approach to developing strong expertise around food packaging, through toolkits which can be shared, primarily, with Regional R&D and Procurement teams
• Support in training newcomers in the Packaging Category teams (Procurement) to ensure a minimum level of expertise as part of their onboarding.
• Participate in regular business reviews with our key Packaging suppliers (jointly with the Category lead) with the aim of capturing any new technological solution / progress.
• Support regulatory teams on Food Contact Materials (FCM) Regulatory Landscape including REACH regulation and to evaluate and respond to new FCM updates.

pladis is an Equal Opportunity Employer, committed to hiring a diverse workforce. All openings will be filled based on qualifications without regard to race, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, marital status, veteran status, disability, age, religion or any other classification protected by law.

We operate a strict Preferred Supplier List. If you are a recruitment agency and wish to submit candidate to be considered for this vacancy, you must have agreed to, and signed, our terms of business.
We will not accept CVs from any other sources other than those currently on our PSL. We will not pay a fee for any candidate that has not been represented by a provider on our PSL.