Vice President, Operations

For over three decades, LaRocca Creative Cakes has earned a reputation for creating premium desserts that Canadians are proud to serve and celebrate. Our success is built on exceptional quality, innovation, and a talented team committed to excellence.

Today, as part of the Sammontana Italia family, La Rocca brings together European craftsmanship and modern scale to deliver premium cakes to thousands of grocery, foodservice, and fine food partners. We are entering an exciting phase of growth and modernization under La Rocca.

As our business continues to grow, we're seeking an exceptional Vice President, Operations to join our Executive Leadership Team and help scale our manufacturing operations while preserving the quality, craftsmanship, and culture that define the LaRocca brand.

We're looking for a leader who is equally comfortable shaping long-term operational strategy as they are walking the plant floor. Someone who leads with visibility, develops people, removes barriers, and builds the systems, processes, and leadership capability needed to support sustainable growth. This is a leader who is accessible, engaged, and committed to empowering supervisors and managers to achieve operational excellence.

As the Vice President of Operations, you will lead all plant-level manufacturing operations in Richmond Hill, Canada, including Production, Quality Assurance, Supply Chain, Maintenance, Sanitation, Logistics, and Warehouse functions within a unionized environment. The role combines hands-on operational leadership with strategic platform building and is accountable for delivering safe, compliant, efficient, and cost-effective operations while driving continuous improvement and operational excellence.

The successful candidate will bring a proven track record of:

• Transforming manufacturing performance through measurable improvements in productivity, quality, service, and operational efficiency.
• Leading from the floor by coaching supervisors and managers, solving problems collaboratively, and building a culture of accountability and continuous improvement.
• Delivering strategic capital investments, automation initiatives, and capacity expansion projects that enable growth.
• Leading successfully within a unionized manufacturing environment while fostering strong labour relationships.
• Building high-performing leadership teams and an operating organization capable of sustaining long-term success.
• Applying rigorous industrial engineering principles, including capacity modelling, line balancing, plant layout, and bottleneck analysis, while distinguishing between theoretical, demonstrated, and sustainable capacity when evaluating and sizing capital investments.
• Partnering with the President and Executive Leadership Team to align Canadian operations capacity with the Company's long-term growth, integration, and expansion plans.
• Partnering closely with Human Resources on collective agreement negotiations, grievance resolution, labour relations, and workforce planning.

The ideal candidate will also possess:

• A minimum of 12–15 years of progressive leadership experience in a manufacturing environment, preferably within the food industry. Experience in high-volume, short shelf-life, multi-SKU operations—such as bakery, frozen desserts, dairy, prepared foods, or confectionery—is strongly preferred. Candidates should also have experience developing multi-year capacity or network plans, with at least 5 years of full accountability for an entire manufacturing plant or multi-site operation.
• Experience with ERP systems, production planning and scheduling tools, and KPI reporting platforms (e.g., Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, Power BI, or equivalent shop-floor systems). Demonstrated fluency with metrics such as Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE), schedule attainment, yield/giveaway, downtime by cause, changeover time, and cost per unit, using data to inform sound operational judgment rather than replace it.

This is an opportunity to make a lasting impact with one of Canada's most respected premium food manufacturers, helping shape our growth strategy while developing the people and operations that will support our future.

Competitive executive compensation, starting at $170,000.00 plus potential performance bonus.

If you've successfully scaled manufacturing operations, built exceptional teams, and delivered measurable business results, we'd welcome a confidential conversation.

A detailed position description is available upon request.