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I’m naturally an early riser, with my body clock waking me up around 5am. I go for a short run before heading into Silvery Tweed for 7am. I’m often the first one into the office, but both Finance Director, Alan Tullis and Head of Technical, Martin Drewery are also early risers, so it isn’t a surprise to see them as I walk into the office.  

If I’m first in, I open up the office, put my laptop down and put on my PPE to meet with Susan Smith, our Quality Manager. We then tour both sites at our Berwick-upon-Tweed headquarters. This gives us an overview of the site’s standards for good manufacturing practices and hygiene. It also gives us the chance to assess the quality of products being made and address any issues we see, such as spillages, broken pallets and to check utensils and equipment are where they need to be for the start of the day as well as any other bits that we feel need to be addressed. From there, we aim to give guidance to the hygiene team and encourage them to identify three to five areas of focus on top of their regular schedule for that day. We also check in with the operations and engineering teams and let them know of any issues that we find.  

This walk-around can take up to two hours and after adding a few thousand steps to my daily count I am then ready for a coffee as I email the points we’ve made verbally to the operations, hygiene and engineering teams. It’s usually by this point of the day that my list of jobs for the day is ripped up and thrown out the window as other priorities come in. 

While having a coffee, all the members of the technical department get together to go over priorities for the week. These could be customer or certification audits that we know we have coming up as well as work we are doing with the new product development team and how new products could impact our existing products and processes. It is also a good bit of team bonding as we often chat through what each other's kids are up to, where we might have been out to eat and things like that. 

Continuous improvement is central to my role, and I am continually developing our food safety and quality management system. This system deals with everything from the development of procedures to the specification of products to hygiene schedules. I try to do some work on it every day to keep the various aspects of the project moving forward. My afternoons often include Teams calls with customers and suppliers to answer queries and maintain relationships.  

I’m now a few months into the role and it continues to evolve, which makes it exciting and means that no two days are the same. I usually finish my day by putting together a to-do list for the following day, before turning off my computer and heading home.