Senior Manager, Produce Quality

Hungryroot is an AI-powered food and wellness company that delivers healthy groceries, recipes, and supplements. The Senior Manager, Produce Quality will lead produce quality standards, supplier accountability, specification governance, food safety compliance, fulfillment center quality training, and data-driven improvement across the supply chain.

Responsibilities:

• Own supplier quality and accountability. Build and maintain strong relationships with growers and shippers to ensure Hungryroot's quality standards are consistently met. Partner with suppliers on quality expectations, shelf-life requirements, and corrective actions, serving as the primary escalation point for quality disputes and driving continuous supplier performance improvement
• Lead produce specification governance. Develop, maintain, and continuously improve specifications across bulk and co-manufactured produce. Create temporary specifications during changing market conditions and serve as the company's technical authority on produce specifications, interpretation, and compliance
• Provide technical leadership across the supply chain. Partner with Category Management, Planning, Operations, and FSQA to provide technical guidance on assortment decisions, supplier capabilities, inbound delivery cadence, truck temperatures, fulfillment center turn days, and seasonal transitions. Develop and recommend produce quality guardrails and operational constraints, leveraging deep knowledge of growing regions, weather patterns, and crop conditions to proactively identify and mitigate quality and supply risks
• Champion food safety and regulatory compliance. Provide technical leadership on produce inspection, grading, and defect identification in accordance with USDA standards and PACA regulations. Serve as Hungryroot's primary USDA liaison, ensuring inspection readiness and compliance while monitoring critical control points and shelf-life expectations across all produce commodities
• Develop world-class fulfillment center quality teams. Train and coach inbound quality teams across the fulfillment center network on standardized inspection procedures, grading methodologies, defect identification, and communication practices to ensure consistent execution nationwide
• Drive continuous improvement through data. Own produce quality performance from customer feedback through corrective action and resolution. Analyze quality trends, identify systemic improvement opportunities, reduce defect rates, and present regular updates on quality performance, emerging risks, and recommendations to cross-functional stakeholders and senior leadership
• Lead specialty quality programs. Oversee in-house retain testing and other quality initiatives to validate supplier shelf-life performance and continuously strengthen Hungryroot's produce quality standards

Requirements:

• 5–10 years of produce inspection or produce quality experience, with deep expertise in USDA grading standards, PACA regulations, and fresh commodity quality assessment
• Hands-on experience inspecting, grading, and evaluating quality across a broad range of fresh produce commodities
• Strong knowledge of growing regions, seasonal transitions, weather impacts, storage crops, and produce supply chain dynamics
• Experience building and managing supplier relationships with growers, shippers, or produce vendors
• Experience utilizing Claude or other AI tools for job related activities such as metric evaluation
• Demonstrated experience developing, maintaining, and governing produce specifications in a retail, foodservice, or direct-to-consumer environment
• Experience supporting quality operations across multiple distribution centers, fulfillment centers, or field locations
• Demonstrated success leading supplier corrective action programs, quality investigations, and supplier performance management
• Experience training, developing, and standardizing quality practices across distributed operational teams
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to clearly communicate produce quality, operational risks, and recommendations to both field teams and executive leadership
• Ability to work independently in a remote environment and travel approximately 30–40% for supplier visits, fulfillment center training, and field assessments