Head of Operations

Head of UCOOK Operations - Johannesburg or Cape Town

UCOOK is a tech start-up and meal-kit delivery service, delivering across South Africa. Our network of top SA chefs creates recipes for our customers to choose from each week, and we deliver the fresh, locally sourced ingredients to their door. With nationwide delivery, we have been in business for over 4 years now, and are a part of the Silvertreebrands group of companies.

We are seeking an experienced, detail-focused and pragmatic Head of Operations, to lead the execution and continuous improvement of our warehouses that assemble and ship UCOOK mealkits weekly.

About the role

Operations for UCOOK stretches across Cape Town and Johannesburg, employing over a hundred staff. Activities include assembly of mealkits (ingredients and menu cards) as well as add-on products (like frozen meals) for UCOOK.

The Head of Operations role oversees and manages our weekly operational rhythm, including receiving fresh ingredients, managing storage and cold chain, portioning, packing, and finally dispatching to our logistics partners.

The role will require substantial time in our facilities, in Midrand (Johannesburg) and Paarden Eiland Cape Town). We do support flexibility in hours and working location, but in practice, you will need to be present most of the time. The nature of UCOOK’s weekly cycle means that production is predominantly over the weekend, so the role will require some work during the weekend. You can be based in either Johannesburg or Cape Town, with travel to the other location.

Your day-to-day focus will be especially on UCOOK operations, but the role includes sitting on the UCOOK management team, and working closely with operations colleagues at other Silvertreebrands companies such as Faithful to Nature and PetHeaven, which share warehousing and systems.

You should be ready to mentor your team members, find ways to improve the quality of the product we send to our customers and implement best practices across all levels. Ultimately, we’ll trust you to help us remain productive, efficient and compliant, whilst delivering a superior product and keeping our staff safe and engaged.

**Responsibilities**:

- ** Lead UCOOK operations and mealkit production**:- End to end responsibility for the operational processes including process optimisation, workforce allocation, people management and problem-solving.
- People management, to ensure that supervisors are effectively managing their teams, that standards are maintained and to avoid wasted time or resources.
- **Responsibility for food safety and compliance**:- Food safety oversight and compliance.
- Standard Operating Procedures - drafting, improving, monitoring.
- **Stock management / control**:- Own accuracy and integrity of stock within warehouses (FIFO / stock takes / variance investigations / communication with procurement)
- **Cost Management**-
- Planning and communicating CAPEX requirements
- Assist in the development of operational budgets
- Monitor and control expenses according to the allocated budget
- Ensure all operations are carried out in an appropriate, cost effective way
- Suggest and implement cost-saving initiatives
- Manage staff levels, wages, hours, contract labour to revenues
- Review and approve all operational invoices and ensure they are submitted for payment
- **Continuous improvement**:- Changing the way we work, to continuously improve the quality and accuracy of our output, and reduce costs.
- **Collaborating on improved tools and technology**:- Working with our projects, processes and tech teams to ensure that any new technology and processes that we deploy is appropriate for use, and implemented successfully.
- Ensuring the standard operating procedures are effectively leveraging our tools.
- **Overseeing courier relationships**:

- Working with couriers for better costs, speed, and/or reliability
- Ensuring that daily courier relationships work well and SLAs are monitored and enforced.
- **Represent operations in overall UCOOK decision making**, as we launch new offerings and experiment to better satisfy our customers
- **Collaborating with operations colleagues in Silvertreebrands group, **to find and capture synergies between warehousing and production teams (e.g., balancing teams across the weekly order rhythm).
- **Key Performance Indicators**:

- Production efficiencies
- Speed of production, dispatch and logistics, target is 100% of orders delivered to customers on the promised day
- Customer complaints / error rates
- Food quality for the customer, reflecting effective cold chains throughout warehousing and production, and proper packaging in chilled boxes for delivery
- Food safety
- Compliance with right processes, including food safety and effective lean manufacturing
- Operations costs
- Staff, packaging, waste per order
- Stock accuracy, write offs
- Logistics cost per order
- Future initiatives
- Successfully deployment of automated production and