Director, Supply chain & Distribution | Directeur.trice, Chaîne logistique et distribution

About this role

<div> <div> <div> <div style="line-height: 1.5;"> <h3 data-section-id="1s9b5s" data-start="0" data-end="13">First, a confession</h3> <p>We make honey in 70 cities across the US, Canada, and multiple countries in Europe. Real honey, from real bees, on commercial rooftops, harvested by our local teams and shipped back to be extracted, bottled, and labeled at our two permanent facilities in Denver and Montreal, and one seasonal in Europe.</p> <p>It is genuinely one of the coolest supply chains you will ever see.</p> <p>It is also held together with a truly heroic amount of Excel and Slack messages.</p> <p>We are a 10 year old company that grew fast and built its operations one clever workaround at a time. Warehouse management, supply chain planning, procurement, freight, carriers. It all works. And that is exactly the challenge, because "it works, sort of" is not going to carry us where we are going.</p> <p>So we are hiring someone to fix that. Not with a slide deck about digital transformation. With their hands, their brain, and a real appetite for untangling knots.</p> <h3>What actually makes this hard</h3> <p>Let me be upfront, because I would rather scare off the wrong people now than in month three.</p> <p><strong>Nature sets the schedule</strong>, not us. Harvest seasons are different in every region. Bees in Los Angeles are not on the same clock as bees in Calgary. That means honey frames are constantly moving across the country, and they all need to get to Denver or Montreal in time and in good shape. You do not get to pick the timeline. The season picks it for you.</p> <p><strong>Then there is the fall.</strong> Every year, in the span of a few weeks, we extract, bottle, and label roughly 300,000 jars of honey so that every single customer gets theirs in November and December. It is intense. It is sticky. It is the kind of stretch where the whole operation has to fire perfectly at once. And then a customer opens a jar of honey harvested from the bees on their own roof, and it is worth every minute. That moment is the whole point of this company.</p> <p><strong>Equipment never stops moving.</strong> We sign new customers every day, which means beehives and gear are constantly traveling between our central warehouses and our local teams in the field. The puzzle is always the same and always hard: get it there fast, without lighting money on fire. Speed and cost pulling against each other, every single day.</p> <p><strong>We source from a lot of places</strong>, on purpose. Labels & signage printing, beehives, honey, pallets, and more. We care about buying local wherever we can, which is the right thing to do and also makes procurement more interesting than just hitting reorder on one vendor.</p> <p><strong>Our default answer to customers is “yes.</strong>” If a customer wants a custom timeline, extra honey, unique beehive equipment to match their local aesthetic, or last minute label changes, we do our best to never say no. It’s great for customer loyalty, but it also means you’re building a shock absorber for constantly changing demands and timelines.</p> <p><strong>And the tooling needs a real rebuild.</strong> This is the part I need to be the most honest about. A lot of how we run today should be rethought from the ground up. Warehouse systems, planning, procurement, freight. There is low hanging fruit you can fix in your first month, and there is a real foundation you will need to build for the years after that. Both matter.</p> <h3>What you would own</h3> <p>You would run the whole physical spine of Alvéole. The two extraction facilities and warehouses in Montreal and Denver, each with a warehouse manager and their lean team. The dozen or so local storage sites scattered across our markets. And a meaningful slice of the P&L (~$3M), including equipment and freight, which means you are not just moving boxes, you are making real calls about how we spend.</p> <ul> <li>Own end to end distribution of honey and equipment across all our markets, from harvest to the customer's hands.</li> <li>Build and own supply chain planning: forecasting demand, managing inventory across all cities (70+), ensuring each market has the equipment needed to operate.</li> <li>Manage new and used equipment, including building a regeneration system to extend equipment life and reduce unnecessary purchasing.</li> <li>Run our two extraction facilities and lead the warehouse managers in Montreal and Denver and their teams, as well as European extraction.</li> <li>Plan and manage the seasonal extraction, bottling, and labeling push, including the fall blitz.</li> <li>Manage procurement and vendor relationships, keeping our local sourcing commitment intact while controlling cost and quality.</li> <li>Own freight and carrier strategy across North America and Europe, balancing speed against cost on every route.</li> <li>Manage the equipment and freight portion of the P&L, and be accountable for the numbers.</li> <li>Choose and roll out better systems and tools to replace the manual, spreadsheet-heavy way we run today.</li> <li>Set the metrics that tell us whether we are actually getting faster and more accurate, and report on them honestly.</li> <li>Hire, coach, and grow the operations team as we scale.</li> </ul> <h3>This is for you if</h3> <ul> <li>You look at a process built on 40 spreadsheets and feel excited about how you can make it better, not defeated.</li> <li>You like…