Operations Manager

The job, in one breath Well-run distributor seeks an unusually talented Operations Manager to run a fresh-produce warehouse the way it ought to be run — safe, efficient, profitable, and a little better every single day.

Start with the customer and work backwards Here’s the thing about fresh produce: the customer is standing in the aisle holding the case we shipped last night, and nothing about our budget, our KPIs, or our good intentions matters to them one bit. They just want it to be perfect. So that’s where we start — with the person who opens the box — and we work backwards to the dock, the line, and the schedule. We’re looking for an Operations Manager who treats every pallet leaving the building as a promise to Loblaws, Sobey’s, Costco, and everyone else who trusts us to get it right. This is still Day 1 for how well this Calgary facility can run, and we want the person who is going to prove it.

What you’ll own You will own the building — production, repack, shipping and receiving, Q/A and inventory, maintenance, all of it — and you will own the outcomes, not the excuses. Owners don’t say “that’s not my job.” They see the whole system and take responsibility for the result. You’ll report to the COO, but the floor reports to you, and what happens on it is yours.

The bar Setting the bar high is the single most important thing we do, so let’s be clear about ours. Seven to ten years running operations in a food-production facility. Genuinely fluent in Lean or Six Sigma — not a certificate on the wall, but the way you actually think about waste, flow, and yield. Strong enough with financials and data that a variance has nowhere to hide. An excellent communicator, because a plan nobody understands is not a plan. A degree in business, engineering, or operations is a welcome asset; the ability to do the job well, in a fraction of the time most competent people think possible, is the real requirement.

The work

Raise the average.

Coach, mentor, and develop your supervisors and managers, and build a culture where accountability is the default rather than the exception. About each of them, keep asking three questions: Will you admire this person? Will they raise the effectiveness of the team around them? And where might they be a superstar? Back it with honest annual performance and wage reviews.

Match people to the work.

Own scheduling and staffing across every department so shifts line up with what the business actually needs — not last month’s plan, and not wishful thinking.

Lead hard, and lead well.

This is demanding work, and it should be — but people are not a line item. Guard your team’s well-being and their work-life harmony as carefully as you guard the P&L. Talented, motivated, intense, and interesting people do their best work when someone is genuinely looking out for them.

Map the floor and design out the waste.

Walk the product’s path end to end and map every step it takes through the building — receiving, production, repack, storage, ship. Every extra foot of travel, every double-handle, every bottleneck is cost the customer never asked to pay. Lay out the floor and the flow around the product, not around how we’ve always done it. When you find a layout that moves more with less, turn it into a documented mechanism — a standard the next shift and the next hire inherit, not tribal knowledge that walks out the door.

Be impossible to surprise.

Keep maintenance current and properly scheduled, and find the failure before it finds you. Good intentions don’t reduce downtime — mechanisms do. Build the mechanisms.

Invent and simplify.

Put strategies in place that make the building measurably more productive, and cut the complexity that quietly slows everything down.

Dive deep on the data.

Review your KPIs constantly and actually use them to get better. But remember: when the metrics and the anecdotes on the floor disagree, the anecdotes are usually right — so go and see for yourself.

Respect every dollar.

Manage costs and budgets to plan, and treat frugality as a form of respect — for the customer and for the business. Waste is a choice, and it’s usually the wrong one.

Get grade-out right.

Waste nothing, but ship nothing you’d be embarrassed to receive. Striking the best possible balance — high-quality product out the door without over-grading good product into the garbage — is a judgment call you’ll make every single day. Make it like an owner.

Insist on the highest standards.

Food-safety and production best practices, tools, and processes get followed every time — not most of the time.

Own safety, completely.

Food safety, facility safety, OHS, and the maintenance that underpins all of it are yours. No production number is worth a person’s safety. None.

Enforce the standard.

Make sure supervisors and employees follow policy and procedure, including how every piece of equipment is operated. A standard you don’t enforce isn’t a standard.

Keep the bar high.

Train your Quality Control and Food Safety team regularly and deliberately. Standards only hold when you keep raising them.

Treat your SOPs as living documents.

Review them on a schedule and rewrite them the moment reality outgrows them. It’s always Day 1.

One honest word before you apply This is not an easy job, and we won’t pretend otherwise. When we describe roles like this to people, we tell them you can work long, hard, or smart — and here, you don’t get to pick two out of three. But you’ll be building something real: a facility that runs beautifully, a team that’s proud to work in it, and a standard of fresh our customers can taste. That is worth doing. If that’s the kind of work you’ve been looking for, we should talk.

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