Location: Norwich
Shift Pattern: Day shifts
Salary: Circa £50,000 per annum
Role Overview The Production Lead is a key operational role responsible for the daily coordination and delivery of production activities within a highly controlled, process-driven environment. This position combines hands-on leadership with technical and operational oversight, ensuring that growing, harvesting, and post-production activities are completed safely, efficiently, and to consistently high quality standards.
Acting as the senior operational presence on shift, the Production Lead is accountable for team performance, adherence to Standard Operating Procedures, production output, and compliance with food safety, hygiene, and traceability requirements. Working closely with site leadership and technical support functions, the role focuses on maintaining production flow, identifying issues early, and driving continuous improvement across people, processes, and yields.
Key Responsibilities
- Lead and oversee daily production activities across all stages of the process, ensuring work is completed safely, efficiently, and to schedule.
- Manage, motivate, and coordinate production operatives, allocating workloads and ensuring consistent adherence to SOPs.
- Monitor production performance and outputs, identifying deviations, issues, or inefficiencies and taking corrective action where required.
- Ensure environmental and process controls are maintained in line with operational and product requirements, working closely with technical support teams.
- Maintain high standards of food safety, hygiene, and site compliance, supporting internal audits and external certification requirements where applicable.
- Execute and refine production schedules, balancing labour, output targets, and available resources.
- Accurately record and report production data, including yields, waste, labour hours, downtime, and quality metrics.
- Support training, coaching, and development of production staff to improve capability, consistency, and flexibility within the team.
- Drive continuous improvement initiatives focused on efficiency, waste reduction, yield optimisation, and process reliability.
- Carry out routine equipment checks, report faults, and liaise with engineering or maintenance teams to minimise downtime.
- Promote a strong health & safety culture, contributing to risk assessments, incident reporting, and safe working practices.
- Coordinate with inventory and procurement functions to ensure materials, consumables, and packaging are available and correctly controlled.
- Ensure accurate documentation and full product traceability from initial production stages through to dispatch.
- Act as the primary operational decision-maker on shift, communicating updates, risks, and performance to management.
- Proven experience in a production, manufacturing, or controlled-environment operation, with clear team leadership responsibility.
- Strong understanding of SOP-driven operations, quality control, and compliance-led environments.
- Confident people leader with the ability to manage workloads, performance, and engagement on the shop floor.
- Process-focused mindset with a track record of driving efficiency and continuous improvement.
- Comfortable working with production data, reporting metrics, and operational KPIs.
- Strong communication skills and the ability to work cross-functionally with technical, engineering, and support teams.
- A proactive, hands-on approach with the confidence to take ownership of shift-level decision-making.