Food Industry Technical Professional

On a food industry technical professional apprenticeship course, you’ll help ensure the safety and quality of food and drink products.

A food industry technical expert is passionate about its business and ensures that all foods are safe to consume, have a consistent appearance, taste, and texture, and take great pride in their work.

This apprenticeship provides various technical professional duties, such as assistant food technical manager, quality manager, shift quality manager, and hygiene manager. You will be in charge of assuring the safety and quality of food goods if you work in one of these roles.

This work includes improving existing goods and launching new ones, engaging with operational teams to develop successful processes and procedures, and creating favourable customer relationships.

A farmer, food manufacturer, or merchant will employ you. In addition, you will get a degree in food science and technology.

What you’ll learn

On a food industry technical professional apprenticeship course, you’ll learn to:

• Interpret microbiological data; find and analyse trends to diagnose or predict issues; create and implement action plans
• Create product specifications while keeping the critical risk factors in product design in mind; ensure client needs are followed.
• Manage, create, and carry out an internal audit strategy to ensure compliance with legal, industry, and customer standards; remain current on new standards, and host third-party audits persuasively.
• Select the most effective methods and approaches to show compliance, a food safety culture, and consistent product quality.
• Create cleaning and hygiene programmes and auditing approaches; create monitoring programmes; and assess outcomes. Determine various danger zones and hygiene requirements in a working location; manage both internal and external cleaning contractors
• Manage complaint performance by recognising trends and creating corrective action programmes to increase customer confidence.
• Design and implement site practices to ensure legal compliance with current food regulations; lead any legal violation investigation with relevant enforcement bodies.
• Define process parameters and control criteria; monitor the process’s impact on the product, create constraints, and take action to resolve process and product nonconformance.
• Optimise and control elements that influence everyday industrial activities such as washing, mixing, heating, cooking, cooling/chilling, freezing, drying, and freeze-drying.
• Examine and choose appropriate scientific procedures while keeping cost and feasibility in mind; experiment, collect and analyse data, and provide solutions
• Manage supplier intake controls, carry out audits, performance evaluations, and risk assessments on suppliers, and have an authorised supplier, contractor, and vendor performance procedure.
• Create and implement a traceability system that meets all customer and regulatory criteria; monitor the process to confirm its validity.
• Lead and create a small technical team on-site.
• Develop and display critical thinking skills in assessing and analysing detailed information and data.

Entry requirements

You’ll usually need:

• Three A-levels, including science or food technology and English and maths, at Level 2.
• Apprentices without level 2 English and maths will need to achieve this level before taking the end-point assessment.

Assessment methods

The End Point Assessment comprises two distinct assessment methods: 

• Workplace Project 
• Technical Interview, underpinned by a portfolio of evidence 

Duration, level, subjects and potential salary upon completion

Apprenticeship standard

More information about the Level 6 Food Industry Technical Professional Apprenticeship standard can be found here.

Apprenticeship end point assessment

For more information about the End Point Assessment Process, please read the Institute of Apprenticeships’ information page