Quality Assurance and Health & Saftey Manager
Vestey Holdings

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My name is Susan.

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I work for an organization called Cottage Delight, which are part of the Vestey group,

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based in Leek in Staffordshire,

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and my job title there is quality assurance and health and safety manager.

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So we specialise in traditional preserves,

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jams, chutneys, sauces, pickles.

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We do a fantastic range of curds, fudge,

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things like that.

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My job, it’s kind of almost broken up into two separate parts,

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the quality assurance part and then the health and safety part.

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So the quality assurance is making sure that everything we make and sell is

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safe to eat, tastes great and won’t do anyone any harm.

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And then the health and safety is looking after the staff

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who actually make the food,

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to make sure there’s no harm comes to them while they’re working on our site.

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You can be at your desk,

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but you can also be down in the factory, you can be around the warehouse,

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you can be visiting your suppliers or out and about visiting customers sometimes,

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so there’s a lot of variety to my job.

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Yeah, it’s never dull. One of the challenges I suppose is that

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there are times where you have to put a stop on something in production

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because it’s not right.

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And that’s where it does take a kind of a strong person.

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I’m fortunate in where I am now in Cottage Delight because quality is one of the prime things for us.

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And if me or one of my team say something is

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not right, we’re not happy with it that is accepted,

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it’s not questioned.

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People skills – I would say almost first

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and foremost – because you have to interact with a lot of people, from the customers,

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the suppliers, and all the staff, that work on the shop floor.

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We are responsible for making sure that

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the procedures are adhered to on the factory floor

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so it’s important

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that you can explain to people, not only what they have to do,

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but why they have to do it. Some kind of background knowledge in science,

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particularly microbiology, is definitely useful because you have to

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know what causes food to go off, what causes people

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to get ill from eating food.

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So I went to school in Ireland,

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so the education system’s slightly different than in the UK. When I was

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in my final years of high school,

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didn’t know what I wanted to do

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but I come from a farming background, so I decided that a degree in agriculture,

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agricultural science, would probably be the one that at least

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I would be with possibly like-minded people and then see where that got me.

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So from that, at the end of year one, I had decided that the food science

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element of things was more interesting than the animal husbandry, or the crop

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husbandry, and forestry and everything else.

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So I went down the food science route. So that’s why I did my degree

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in food science.

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Towards the end of my degree

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I had to do a placement, an industry placement,

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so that was in a dairy. I worked in the lab there testing the milk

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coming in from the farms.

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The following summer, I worked in a grain intake,

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and we were testing that for moisture level – and then by that stage I’d finished

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uni and I was ready to go into the world full time.

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So I worked in a company that supplied herbs and spices,

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mainly to the butchery trade,

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and I was doing

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testing on all the products coming in to make sure they were suitable for use.

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From there, then I got a job in the bakery,

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and that was quality control in the bakery,

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looking after mainly the hygiene and all that kind of stuff.

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I went to a different bakery after that,

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which was a slightly larger company,

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so that gave me my first exposure of working within a quality team

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and having more than one person kind of responsible for the job.

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Then for personal reasons, moved to the UK,

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settled in Stoke on Trent and saw a job advertised

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locally in Cottage Delight looking for a quality manager.

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Went for the interview and got the job. I think I’ve flowed through life

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without much of a plan and ended up where I am now. I would never describe myself

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as being particularly ambitious or anything like that.

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I just kind went from one job to the next.

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So my advice would be to work for a small company

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because there just aren’t large teams to do tasks.

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I think with the smaller company, lots of people have to pick up things.

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So you get the variety working in a small company and

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experience a lot of different things.

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So I think that’s what I would advise.