VP- Manufacturing Excellence

Clemens Food Group is building a manufacturing system that delivers safe food, predictable performance, and durable results at scale. The Vice President of Manufacturing Excellence will be the executive steward of that system. This is not a Lean deployment role, a consulting overlay, or a staff advisory position. This is a hands-on enterprise leadership role for someone who has lived manufacturing reality and knows how to translate it into sustained performance.

If you have led factories, owned outcomes, and built systems that still worked after you left the room, we want to talk.

The Impact You’ll Make

• Establish and sustain a manufacturing operating system that improves safety, quality, delivery, and cost across the network.


• Build credibility with plant leaders by speaking the language of flow, constraints, reliability, and tradeoffs.


• Create durable gains through leadership behaviors and management routines, not heroics or tool rollouts.


• Strengthen capital discipline, engineering standards, and maintenance reliability to support growth.


• Develop internal leaders who can run the system without dependence on corporate oversight.

What You’ll Do

• Lead and integrate Engineering, Capital Projects, Continuous Improvement, and Corporate Maintenance.


• Serve as executive steward of the manufacturing operating system, including governance, cadence, escalation, and leader standard work.


• Partner with plant leaders to improve performance through stability first, then improvement.


• Ensure capital projects are prioritized, governed, and delivered with clear business impact.


• Build a corporate maintenance capability that improves uptime, reliability, and asset life.


• Translate shop-floor performance into executive and board-level insights.


• Recruit, develop, and retain a high-credibility team of manufacturing excellence leaders.

What Makes This Role Exciting

• Enterprise influence with real accountability.


• A mandate to build a system, not just run initiatives.


• Direct exposure to senior leadership and strategic decision-making.


• The opportunity to leave behind a leadership bench, not a dependency.


• A culture that values operational truth over PowerPoint polish.

What We’re Looking For

This role has non-negotiables.

You must bring deep manufacturing credibility.
You have personally led operations in real factories. You have owned outcomes at the line, shift, plant, or network level. Plant leaders respect you because you have lived the tradeoffs.

You are a system builder.
You have designed, rebuilt, or scaled a manufacturing or business operating system. You understand governance, cadence, accountability, and behavior change. You know when not to deploy tools.

You can lead change at scale.
You influence without authority, sequence change thoughtfully, and sustain gains after rollout teams leave. You build believers, not compliance.

You deliver results with receipts.
You can quantify impact over time and explain what worked, what failed, and why.

You build talent.
You develop plant managers and OpEx leaders who outperform without you. You coach executives, not just operators.

Skills and Mindset

• 10+ years of senior manufacturing leadership experience, ideally in protein, food, or complex process manufacturing.


• Proven ownership of operational excellence outcomes.


• Pragmatic application of Lean, Six Sigma, TPM, or TOC without dogma.


• Executive maturity, calm under pressure, and comfort with pushback.


• Humility with backbone, low ego, high standards, relentless follow-through.

This Role Is Not For You If

• You have never owned a manufacturing outcome.


• Your experience is primarily advisory or consulting.


• You measure success by tools deployed instead of behaviors changed.


• You rely on central teams to drive results indefinitely.


• You are uncomfortable being unpopular temporarily to do what is right.

Your Future at Clemens Food Group

You will shape how manufacturing excellence is defined and executed across the enterprise. Your legacy will be measured by results that last, leaders who grow, and a system that runs without heroics.

Application Note:

Clemens Food Group does not accept unsolicited resumes from search or staffing firms. All resumes submitted by search or staffing firms to any employee at Clemens Food Group via email, the Internet, or directly without a valid written search agreement for this role, and without having been asked to participate in this by Talent Acquisition, will be deemed the sole property of Clemens Food Group, and no fee will be paid in the event the candidate is hired. Firms not authorized to submit candidates will not be eligible for any fee or ownership claim.