Director, Food Production & Food Claims, EU

The Director, Food Production & Food Claims, EU leads the regional execution of the Food Production and Food Claims global business strategy, ensuring achievement of financial and business goals aligned with the NSF mission, values, and strategy. Food Production is a global business unit covering various sectors of the food industry’s supply chain such as service assurance, agriculture, and certification while Food Claims focuses on organic food certification and accreditation services. This position is accountable for accelerating organizational performance across the EU through the implementation of growth strategies and best practices to ensure profitability, seamless alignment, and productivity of NSF services. This position reports to senior leadership, and this hybrid role will be based out of the Bologna office.

• Drive the implementation of the global Food Production & Food Claims strategy at a regional level. Ensures financial and operational goals and growth strategies are achieved and aligned with customer expectations and the NSF strategy, mission, and values.
• Achieve client service level expectations and requirements by meeting defined Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) and targets. Ensuring client satisfaction is evident with the services provided, while utilizing client-facing resources of the team to gain feedback and insight into customer needs.
• Drive NSF sales model for overall growth.
• Technical leadership around NSF service offerings to the operational, product and service delivery teams while managing the business application of Food Production & Food Claims services.
• Work with operational managers to drive performance and cost-effective improvement of operational measures to improve support to all stakeholders against set and agreed KPIs. Report on relevant KPI performance.
• Manage client liaison and relationships to ensure profitable growth of the accounts and deal with complaints to the satisfaction of the clients and NSF alike.
• Assist in the identification of business development opportunities with the Sales and Marketing plans/campaigns in-conjunction with Marketing & Communications and Food Production & Food Claims leadership.
• Work with co-leaders to develop a culture of engaged, high performing, developed and accountable talent to support the organization. Ensure teams are empowered to meet and exceed goals through performance management, leadership development, and business acumen. Attract and retain the best talent through effective recruiting, coaching, and mentoring.
• Leads by example by exhibiting the NSF values. Serves as a strong motivator and leader for team members, inspiring talent to achieve higher levels of performance. Maintains positive team-oriented operations that support the NSF positive culture vision.
• Assist in developing the business unit’s budget aligned with the leadership team. Present the budget, impact, positioning, deliverables, and resources to ensure achievement of revenue and margins as defined in the strategy and goals.
• Establish and maintain critical relationships with internal and external stakeholders including customers, team, standard owners, and others as required to ensure existing requirements are met and future needs are identified.
• Assist in the appropriate development and implementation of Food Production or Food Claims technology solutions to deliver competitive advantage.
• Operate within company authorization levels, personnel policies, health & safety procedures, and all relevant standards of compliance.
• Carry out other ad-hoc duties/projects as may be required from time to time.
• Support administration of country specific legal obligations and reporting.

• Bachelor’s degree in business, or a related field.
• Relevant experience in the food industry, as in the testing, inspection, and certification (TIC) sector, and food manufacturing.
• Relevant experience in a business leadership or general management role.
• Experience developing and implementing strategy.
• Demonstrated experiencing leading and driving results in both remote and hybrid work environments.
• Demonstrated experience leading a global program and/or regional operations, including the ability to identify market trends, acquisition targets, and innovative services.
• Demonstrated experience in owning/managing P&L ($9M) including allocating resources and managing expenses to achieve or exceed revenue and profit targets.
• Demonstrated ability to build strong customer relationships, understand customer needs and deliver customer-centric solutions aligned with the mission and goals.
• Demonstrated ability to build and lead teams, including selecting and developing talent, building trust, coaching team members, and managing per