Food Science Technicians

Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier. At 11 the split is real: inline NIR moisture, automated pH probes and plate-reader colony counters have already displaced routine assays, and your CoA transcription, SPC charting and spec-vs-label checks are LIMS-and-LLM work — but sensory panel prep, sanitation swabbing on a wet floor, and hand-titrating a fat content on a product that clogs the analyzer keep it out of single digits.

Hands-on in uncontrolled environments. 13 reflects that sampling happens where the product is — climbing to a mixer hatch, pulling retorts from a 250°F autoclave, standing in a 34°F cooler cutting cores from a cheese block, dodging a running line during a shift changeover — an uncontrolled plant floor, not a clean bench, though you return to a fixed lab bay for most of the assay work.

Certification preferred, not legally required. 5 is for HACCP or ServSafe-style certification and USDA/FDA-recognized method training that employers ask for, not a state license: nothing stops the plant from putting a trained operator on the pH meter, and FSMA's Preventive Controls Qualified Individual designation — the one with legal weight — sits with the QA manager, not you.

Anonymous artifact production. 4 because the customer of your work is a spec sheet and a batch record; the audit trail, not your name, is what a BRC auditor or a co-man customer reads, and a new tech can take over your bench Monday with no one downstream noticing.

Meaningful discretion. 7 covers the calls you actually make — flagging an out-of-spec Brix, deciding a plate is too overgrown to count, judging whether an off-odor merits escalation — while the hold/release decision, the recall, and the deviation disposition are signed by someone with the PCQI title above you.