Job title Senior Manager, Quality Assurance & Regulatory Affairs
Company Farm Girl Cereal
Location Mississauga, ON L5N 4J4 — on-site
Job type Full-time, permanent
Pay $80– $150K per year
Schedule Monday to Friday, day shift
Work location In person
Education Bachelor's degree
Experience Quality assurance / regulatory affairs: 7 years (required)
Licence / certification HACCP (required); PCQI (required); SQF Practitioner, BRCGS or FSSC 22000 (required)Senior Manager, Quality Assurance & Regulatory Affairs
Farm Girl Cereal — Mississauga, ON — On-site — Full-time
About us
Farm Girl makes its own cereal. We twin-screw extrusion lines in Mississauga today, with a new facility under construction that adds 8 larger lines. We are the number one selling cereal at Costco Canada, we're carried at Walmart Canada, and our US expansion is underway. We buy our grain and pulses directly from the farmers who grow them.
This is a low-moisture, ready-to-eat manufacturing environment. Extrusion is our lethality step. The dryer and cooler are our post-lethality exposed-product zones. If you understand why those two sentences shape our entire food safety program, this posting was written for you.
About the role
You are the senior quality and regulatory authority for the company. You own the SQF certificate, the SFCR licence, the FDA file, the CFIA relationship, final label approval, and a small QA team. You report to the Vice President of R&D and Quality, and you work daily with production, R&D, and operators on the floor.
Two things define your first eighteen months. First, the new facility — licensing it, registering it, certifying it, and validating the process on two larger lines without putting a mark on the Mississauga certificate. Second, our US expansion, which means running FDA obligations in parallel with Canadian ones rather than sequentially.
If you have taken a site from uncertified to certified before, lead with that.
What you'll own
Food safety
- HACCP and the SFCR Preventive Control Plan
- Extrusion lethality validation and revalidation, including on the 8 new lines
- Hygienic zoning across the dryer and cooler
- Environmental monitoring — swab plan, trend interpretation, and a defined response to a positive
- Dry sanitation and controlled wet-clean protocols
- Foreign material control: magnets, metal detection and X-ray, sieve and screen integrity, glass and brittle plastic register
- Allergen changeover validation and sanitation verification on shared lines
Certification and licensing
- SQF Practitioner of record for both sites
- Recertification audits, retailer audits, and the corrective actions that follow them
- SFCR licensing for the second facility, and its site certification from zero
- FDA food facility registration for both sites
Regulatory and labelling — Canada and US
- Label development and final approval under CFIA and Health Canada requirements: Nutrition Facts derivation, allergen and precautionary declarations, front-of-package nutrition symbol requirements, and bilingual English/French compliance
- A 21 CFR 117 preventive controls plan maintained alongside the SFCR PCP
- FDA Nutrition Facts labelling under 21 CFR 101 — RACC serving sizes, US rounding, and the US major allergen list including sesame
- FSVP documentation support for our US importer, prior notice, and import mechanics
- Claims and certification programs — organic, Non-GMO Project, gluten-free, vegan, kosher, halal — including certifier relationships and the audit trail behind every claim on our packaging
Materials, analytical, and systems
- Supplier approval and raw material risk for directly sourced grain and pulses: COAs, mycotoxin and residue risk, incoming gluten testing on oats. You will build this program, not inherit a broker's version of it
- Water activity control, oxidative stability, and accelerated shelf-life protocol design
- Third-party lab selection and management
- QMS administration, document control, CAPA and root cause investigation, KPI and trend reporting to leadership
- Mock recall and mass-balance traceability exercises under both CFIA and FDA procedures
Team
- Lead, mentor, and grow the QA function as we go from one facility to two
What you need
- Bachelor's degree in Food Science, Microbiology, Chemistry, or a related discipline
- 7+ years in quality assurance and/or regulatory affairs in food manufacturing, including 3+ years as the most senior quality decision-maker at a site — the person the plant escalates to, not one of several
- HACCP certification
- PCQI certification, with a 21 CFR 117 preventive controls plan you personally authored and a hazard analysis you signed
- SQF Practitioner, BRCGS, or FSSC 22000 certification, and experience as the named practitioner of record at a certified site through at least one recertification audit
- Direct hands-on experience with CFIA regulations, SFCR licensing, and CFIA inspections — a licence held under your site, a PCP you wrote, inspections you personally fronted
- Working US regulatory competence: FDA facility registration, FSMA preventive controls, and FDA labelling under 21 CFR 101. You don't need to have run a US plant, but you do need to have been the person answering FDA questions rather than forwarding them
- Experience creating and giving final approval to retail food labels for both Canadian and US markets, including bilingual French compliance
- Comfortable in a plant. You will swab, sample, stand on a line during a changeover, and talk to operators directly
Strong assets
- Low-moisture ready-to-eat experience — cereal, snack, extruded, powder, confection, or bakery. This is the single most transferable thing you can bring us
- Experience taking a site from uncertified to GFSI certified, or commissioning a new facility
- Extrusion process knowledge — thermal validation, moisture and water activity control, or scale-up
- Experience standing up a cross-border export program from the Canadian side, or supporting a US importer's FSVP obligations
- Direct experience liaising with CFIA or FDA during an inspection, hold, detention, or recall
- Experience at a company small enough that there was no separate regulatory department
- SQF or GFSI auditor certification
What this job is not
We'd rather tell you now than in month three.
There is no separate regulatory affairs department, no separate labelling group, and no corporate QMS waiting for you. Some of what you need doesn't exist yet, and you will build it. You'll make decisions with imperfect information and defend them. Some weeks you're writing a validation protocol; some weeks you're on the floor at 6 a.m. because a metal detector failed a check.
In exchange you get real authority — including the authority to hold product, with no commercial override — a direct line to the founders, and a quality system with your name on it instead of someone else's. Plus the chance to license, register, and certify a brand-new plant, which is something most quality careers never offer once.
How to apply
Apply through Indeed with your resume and a short note. In the note, tell us about one food safety or regulatory system you built from nothing — what existed before, what you built, and how you knew it worked.
We evaluate evidence, not keywords. Applications without a note still get read.
Farm Girl Cereal is an equal opportunity employer. We welcome applications from all qualified candidates. Accommodations are available on request for candidates taking part in any stage of the selection process.
Pay: $65,000.00-$150,000.00 per year
Benefits:
- Dental care
- On-site parking
Work Location: In person
