Steph Thompson Email & Phone Number

Slough, England, United Kingdom

Chicago, Illinois, United States

Chicago, Illinois, United States

Bracknell, Berkshire

Waitrose & Partners, the food division of John Lewis Partnership, operates around 350 stores and has a revenue of £5.4bn per annum. Waitrose takes pride in being the nation’s most principled retailer, championing the values of treading lightly on our planet, living well through eating healthy and nutritious foods and treating all people fairly. Reporting to the Category Technical Manager, accountable for the Morning Goods, Pre-packed Cakes, Yogurt and Ice-cream sub-categories from… Show more Waitrose & Partners, the food division of John Lewis Partnership, operates around 350 stores and has a revenue of £5.4bn per annum. Waitrose takes pride in being the nation’s most principled retailer, championing the values of treading lightly on our planet, living well through eating healthy and nutritious foods and treating all people fairly. Reporting to the Category Technical Manager, accountable for the Morning Goods, Pre-packed Cakes, Yogurt and Ice-cream sub-categories from a technical perspective.♦ Established the creation of a cross category Mould Working Group, in collaboration with internal stakeholders and key suppliers, to understand the introduction and contributory factors of mould growth within the supply chain to identify proactive solutions to reduce exposure to customers.♦ Technical Manager lead on the Continuous Improvement program for the Waitrose and John Lewis Partnership ways of working merger.♦ Proactively initiated the creation of Waitrose Brand Standards and associated audit protocol to ensure that the supply base consistently delivers the requirements expected by Waitrose and to support the achievement of their brand commitments.♦ Proactively created and trialed input based Quality Management Process improvements for the cake category, by using moisture analysis to understand texture and eating quality over life and relate to customer perception of “dry” in order to reduce complaints and derive an objective measurement by which to optimise process and product performance.♦ Extensive work conducted on sugar reduction in all sub-categories to further the Waitrose nutrition credentials. This included research on innovative techniques and processing methods for products where sugar plays a functional role both from a production perspective but also as a preservative, while ensuring there is no detriment to the quality of the product. Show less

Holborn

The Sainsbury’s Supermarket division of J Sainsbury’s PLC operates over 1,300 store locations, with around 25 million customer transactions weekly and a revenue of £23.5bn per annum. Reporting to the Category Technical Manager, accountable for the chilled Hot Pie, Cold Pie, Quiche, Pate and Party Food sub-categories from a technical perspective. Managed and oversaw the professional development of a Placement Student and coaches a number of the graduate trainee technologists.♦… Show more The Sainsbury’s Supermarket division of J Sainsbury’s PLC operates over 1,300 store locations, with around 25 million customer transactions weekly and a revenue of £23.5bn per annum. Reporting to the Category Technical Manager, accountable for the chilled Hot Pie, Cold Pie, Quiche, Pate and Party Food sub-categories from a technical perspective. Managed and oversaw the professional development of a Placement Student and coaches a number of the graduate trainee technologists.♦ Fresh Business Unit Program Lead for a revolutionary strategic business quality transformation initiative. This consisted of overseeing the delivery of multiple projects, which focussed on using objective analytical techniques to measure quality through the supply chain. ♦ Initiated and delivered two key quality projects within the Own Brand team, working on the freshness of the Counters proposition and reducing the customer cooking time of quiche (high risk) to achieve optimum quality, saving customers over 400,000 hours a year.♦ Delivered a significant reduction of hair and plastic complaints across the Meal Solutions category of 44% and 27% respectively, with some suppliers achieving an individual reduction of over 87% in plastic finds. This was achieved through the creation and delivery of a foreign body complaint reduction workshop, using techniques and concepts not only from food manufacturing but also the pharmaceutical and aeronautics industries.♦ Worked with suppliers and supply chain colleagues to understand order profiles and minimum batch quantities, to more effectively schedule production runs, which significantly reduced food waste. Show less

Redhill, United Kingdom

Lovering Foods is the UK’s leading, award winning, independently owned importers and distributors of canned foods and ambient high quality fish, fruit and vegetable products.Headed a technical team totalling 5 personnel, responsible for ensuring the food safety, legality and quality of all the products we supply.♦ Extensive experience auditing the global supply base and further supporting and coaching canneries in the successful implementation of GFSI and retailer standards into… Show more Lovering Foods is the UK’s leading, award winning, independently owned importers and distributors of canned foods and ambient high quality fish, fruit and vegetable products.Headed a technical team totalling 5 personnel, responsible for ensuring the food safety, legality and quality of all the products we supply.♦ Extensive experience auditing the global supply base and further supporting and coaching canneries in the successful implementation of GFSI and retailer standards into their site operations.♦ Development and implementation of the first Lovering Foods Supplier Technical Standards and associated audit protocol, defining and documenting the business expectations and providing a method against which to monitor and improve supplier quality performance.♦ Acted as HACCP expert in for a number of overseas sites in Asia, to build their understanding and implementation of HACCP which ensured the successful and smooth launch of a number of innovative first to market own label products.♦ Designed, created and introduced a robust HACCP principled Quality Management System, linking the functions of the head office and warehouse storage facility. These sites were successfully certificated against the BRC Global Standard for Storage and Distribution Issue 2 in December 2014 and the BRC Global Standard for Agents and Brokers Issue 1 in early 2015.♦ Implemented a risk-based quality sampling system at the warehouse, for the Quality Assurance Technician to monitor the consistency of quality and packaging of all products supplied against defined Quality Attribute Sheets. Show less

Lovering Foods is the UK’s leading, award winning, independently owned importers and distributors of canned foods and ambient high quality fish, fruit and vegetable products.To meet our customers’ demanding needs, we travel the world to find new and exciting products to bring to the UK and always with a focus on technical excellence, ethical sourcing and sustainability.I head a technical team totalling 5 personnel, responsible for ensuring the food safety, legality and quality… Show more Lovering Foods is the UK’s leading, award winning, independently owned importers and distributors of canned foods and ambient high quality fish, fruit and vegetable products.To meet our customers’ demanding needs, we travel the world to find new and exciting products to bring to the UK and always with a focus on technical excellence, ethical sourcing and sustainability.I head a technical team totalling 5 personnel, responsible for ensuring the food safety, legality and quality of all the products we supply. Show less

I was the primary point of contact for a number of major UK Retail and Foodservice customers, ensuring that all technical perspectives of their accounts are managed and communicated within the business effectively. This included consulting at the beginning of NPD projects, subsequent specification generation and artwork approval, through to first production to ensure that the customer’s requirements have been met. I also maintained and controlled many of the systems used within the… Show more I was the primary point of contact for a number of major UK Retail and Foodservice customers, ensuring that all technical perspectives of their accounts are managed and communicated within the business effectively. This included consulting at the beginning of NPD projects, subsequent specification generation and artwork approval, through to first production to ensure that the customer’s requirements have been met. I also maintained and controlled many of the systems used within the Technical Department, for all sites in the UK, including the supplier database and the analytical services provider. Show less

Bsc Hons Food Manufacture - Quality And Technical Management, Food Manufacture, 2:1

Fssc22000 Lead Auditor

Advanced Haccp (Level 4)

Bachelor Of Science (Bsc), Forensic Science