Senior Manager, Produce Quality

Hungryroot is using AI to build the most consumer-centric food and wellness company to ever exist. We act as your personal assistant for healthy living—getting to know your goals, lifestyle, and budget, and recommending and delivering healthy groceries, easy recipes, and essential supplements for you and your family.

It’s the easiest way to eat healthy, achieve your goals, save time, and discover new foods. We believe food is the foundation of health, convenience should not mean compromise, and that everyone is unique in how they eat and live. That’s why we’re building a future in which healthy living is both easy and enjoyable.

Hungryroot is a distributed team of top talent across 28+ U.S. states. While we have a headquarters in New York City, our remote-first culture emphasizes collaboration, team-building, and flexibility. Expect regular virtual team events, strong ownership and accountability, and an annual company retreat.

About the Role

We are looking for an experienced Senior Manager, Produce Quality to join our Operations team as the technical authority on produce quality, specification governance, and supplier execution. This is a newly created, high-impact role responsible for ensuring our produce consistently meets the standards our customers expect from a premium, healthy grocer.

Produce is our most perishable and operationally complex category. In this role, you will serve as the critical link between growers and shippers, our five Fulfillment Centers (FCs), and cross-functional partners across Category Management, Planning, and Food Safety & Quality (FSQA). You will drive supplier accountability, establish quality standards, develop field teams, and proactively identify risks before they impact our customers.

This is a remote position with approximately 30–40% travel for supplier visits, fulfillment center training, and field assessments.

Responsibilities

• Own supplier quality and accountability. Build and maintain strong relationships with growers and shippers to ensure Hungryroot’s quality standards are consistently met. Partner with suppliers on quality expectations, shelf-life requirements, and corrective actions, serving as the primary escalation point for quality disputes and driving continuous supplier performance improvement.
• Lead produce specification governance. Develop, maintain, and continuously improve specifications across bulk and co-manufactured produce. Create temporary specifications during changing market conditions and serve as the company’s technical authority on produce specifications, interpretation, and compliance.
• Provide technical leadership across the supply chain. Partner with Category Management, Planning, Operations, and FSQA to provide technical guidance on assortment decisions, supplier capabilities, inbound delivery cadence, truck temperatures, fulfillment center turn days, and seasonal transitions. Develop and recommend produce quality guardrails and operational constraints, leveraging deep knowledge of growing regions, weather patterns, and crop conditions to proactively identify and mitigate quality and supply risks.
• Champion food safety and regulatory compliance. Provide technical leadership on produce inspection, grading, and defect identification in accordance with USDA standards and PACA regulations. Serve as Hungryroot’s primary USDA liaison, ensuring inspection readiness and compliance while monitoring critical control points and shelf-life expectations across all produce commodities.
• Develop world-class fulfillment center quality teams. Train and coach inbound quality teams across the fulfillment center network on standardized inspection procedures, grading methodologies, defect identification, and communication practices to ensure consistent execution nationwide.
• Drive continuous improvement through data. Own produce quality performance from customer feedback through corrective action and resolution. Analyze quality trends, identify systemic improvement opportunities, reduce defect rates, and present regular updates on quality performance, emerging risks, and recommendations to cross-functional stakeholders and senior leadership.
• Lead specialty quality programs. Oversee in-house retain testing and other quality initiatives to validate supplier shelf-life performance and continuously strengthen Hungryroot’s produce quality standards.

Qualifications

• 5–10 years of produce inspection or produce quality experience, with deep expertise in USDA grading standards, PACA regulations, and fresh commodity quality assessment.
• Hands-on experience inspecting, grading, and evaluating quality across a broad range of fresh produce commodities.
• Strong knowledge of growing regions, seasonal transitions, weather impacts, storage crops, and produce supply chain dynamics.
• Experience building and managing supplier relationships with growers, shippers, or produce vendors.
• Experience utilizing Claude or other AI tools for job-related activities such as metric evaluation.
• Demonstrated experience developing, maintaining, and governing produce specifications in a retail, foodservice, or direct-to-consumer environment.
• Experience supporting quality operations across multiple distribution centers, fulfillment centers, or field locations.
• Demonstrated success leading supplier corrective action programs, quality investigations, and supplier performance management.
• Experience training, developing, and standardizing quality practices across distributed operational teams.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to clearly communicate produce quality, operational risks, and recommendations to both field teams and executive leadership.
• Ability to work independently in a remote environment and travel approximately 30–40% for supplier visits, fulfillment center training, and field assessments.