Head of Food Safety, Quality, and Regulatory

Who We Are

The Farmer’s Dog was born from a mission to change the landscape of pet health, providing dogs and their humans with honest, smart, and simple care. We’re starting by radically improving the $90 billion pet food industry, replacing bags of highly-processed pellets with a personalized subscription service that sends complete and balanced, freshly-made dog food directly to customers’ doors. Our ultimate goal is to create innovative, delightful and personalized experiences across all aspects of pet care, and we believe our direct-to-consumer   to shepherd this backwards industry into the future.

To date, The Farmer’s Dog has delivered over 1 billion meals nationwide and raised over $150M in funding to help us build a company as healthy as the dogs who are eating those meals. Join us as we continue to develop ways of bringing peace of mind to customers, health to their companions, and much-needed change to the way people feed and care for their pets.

#LongLiveDogs

What We Stand For and Where You'll Come In

The Head of Food Safety, Quality, and Regulatory will lead all aspects of food safety, quality assurance, compliance, and provide strategic input into Research & Development (R&D) projects. He/she will be a key technical expert, focusing on training, auditing, and troubleshooting microbiological challenges to ensure the integrity of our products and processes. The Sr. Dir Director will act as both a technical expert and thought leader, guiding cross-functional teams and contributing to the advancement of industry standards and practices This individual will ensure the safe and efficient launch of new products while maintaining regulatory compliance, developing quality systems, and driving continuous improvement initiatives for production facilities.

One Team: We don’t think of ourselves as “Acquisition Marketers”, “Engineers”, “Data Analysts”, or “Product Managers”. Beyond denoting skill sets and areas of expertise, we don’t think departments matter. We’d rather align ourselves to the goals we’re working to achieve and make sure we have necessary subject matter expertise to drive meaningful impact. We strive to orient ourselves around customer problems TOGETHER – getting the right people, with the right context, in the right rooms/Zooms to solve problems holistically.

We are skeptical about everything and precious about nothing:  Ideas can and should come from anywhere, and we aren’t tied to our own. We proactively source input. We talk to our customers and leads regularly and are quick to change course if we know there’s a better or more impactful way to solve problems.

We consider the customer journey in all of our decisions:  We know that no interaction exists in a silo and therefore understand how important every single one is.  We ensure our strategy sets prospective and new customers up for success and drives long-term retention.  We answer questions and address problems early and proactively.  We understand the value of different channels, initiatives, and messages and know how to articulate impact and advocate for prioritization holistically.

We Execute For Impact: We don’t subscribe to “best practices” or “industry KPIs”. We’re uninterested in how we compare to “benchmarks”; instead we orient ourselves around being the best we can possibly be. Similarly, we don’t subscribe to rigid or classical expectations of roles – i.e. acquisition is hyper-focused on improving customer retention and experience.

We Are Focused and Work Without Assumption: We are not beholden to ideas. We have goals and believe everything beyond that is a series of hypotheses to validate. To that end, we seek to work in sequence and not in parallel. We constantly ask ourselves, “what’s the most important hypothesis I should be working on right now? How do I confirm or reject that hypothesis as fast as possible?”. We rarely have timelines/deadlines and are constantly taking in new information and adjusting our priorities accordingly. We don’t expect to be perfect the first time.

How You'll Make An Impact

• Develop and implement comprehensive food safety and quality assurance programs across all facilities, including copackers.
• Ensure compliance with FDA, USDA, and other relevant regulatory standards for RTE sliced meats/meals and portable snack trays.
• Oversee food safety audits, inspections, and certifications (e.g., SQF, BRC, HACCP) and ensure corrective actions are completed promptly.
• Collaborate with copackers to ensure they meet company and regulatory food safety and quality requirements.
• Act as a key partner to the R&D team, providing guidance on food safety, quality, and regulatory aspects of new product development and ref