Head of Human Resources

We Make It and We Sell It. From the French Pot to the Front Counter, HR Has to Work in Both Places.

Head of Human Resources · Graeter’s Ice Cream · October 2026

Most senior HR roles ask you to be excellent at one thing. This one asks for two.

Graeter's is a retail company and a manufacturing company operating under a single name — roughly 1,800 team members at summer peak across 61 scoop shops, and about 200 year-round across two plants and a distribution center.

Graeter's runs both businesses under one name and needs a single unifying HR leader for both.

What that actually means

Same company, same handbook, same payroll file, same ownership trust. Almost nothing else in common:

Write one policy that fits both and it fits neither. Write two of everything and within a year you have two companies with two standards, and you find out when somebody compares notes.

The job is the seam between them. There is one handbook, one pay structure, one payroll, one set of employment laws, and one ESOP covering everyone — and someone must make all that work for two populations who would not recognize each other’s Tuesday.

Who we are

Graeter’s has been making ice cream in Cincinnati since 1870, two and a half gallons at a time, in French pots, by hand. Five generations later, the family whose name is on the carton is still here, and 40% of the company is now held in an ESOP trust on behalf of the people who work here. There is no exit on anyone’s calendar and no fund waiting to flip us.

Roughly 2,000 full and part-time team members at peak, about 750 full-time equivalents, plus a growing grocery and e-commerce business. We are expanding retail and staying independent while we do it.

Why you would report to three people

Because there are two businesses, and pretending otherwise would be the easy mistake:

• The Chief of Retail Operations —everything HR for the retail company. Much of your week.
• The Chief Financial Officer —the plant, distribution, corporate, and the compensation program.
• The Chief Executive Officer —your line of record. Your review, your compensation, and the final call when the two businesses want opposite things — which they will.

This is a real matrix, and we are not going to pretend it is simple. What it gives you is unusual breadth and unusually short distance from the decision. What it asks of you is the discipline to keep all three informed, to surface a conflict early with a recommendation attached, and never to become an instrument of one executive against another. The job description includes a written decision-rights table, so there is no ambiguity about who decides what.

If you have done this well before, you know it is a genuine skill and that most companies never bother to define it. We did.

The team — and this part is not hypothetical

Most postings at this level promise a team and then spend two years explaining why the budget moved. We have already done the sizing work, and it follows the same two-business logic:

• Today:you, plus an HR Manager who runs Paycom, weekly payroll, and records for everyone.
• Your first hire, within six months:an HR Manager for Retail. Sixty-one shops deserve a dedicated person, and this one reports to you rather than into operations — because the job includes investigating the people who run those shops.

The work that needs to be perfect!

• Youth-employment compliance.We employ minors across 61 shops in multiple states. Work permits, school-year hour restrictions, and prohibited-duty rules apply, and we keep that documentation in order—no exceptions.
• Wage-hour consistency.Break, timekeeping, and overtime practices are audited regularly so they stay consistent and compliant across all locations.
• Redundancy.One person holds weekly payroll for a company that reaches 2,000 people. There is no second-qualified operator.
• Investigations.At our size there are serious matters every year, and we need a trained, independent internal investigator.

What we are not asking for

We are not looking for someone to tear the function down and rebuild it. Our systems are sound. Retail and production training are owned by the leaders of those teams and stay there. The benefits partner is embedded and staying.

What we want is steady improvement made while the work continues. Tighten what needs tightening. Get real value out of the platform we already own. Leave the things that are working alone.

What you’d be held to

In your first twelve to eighteen months:

• The manufacturing business:production and corporate leadership getting HR support they call responsive and useful — measured, not assumed.
• The seam:one handbook, one pay structure, and one standard of practice holding across both, without either side feeling governed by rules written for the other.
• Compliance:limited adverse findings and open documentation deficiencies in either business.

You might be the person we’re looking for if…

• You have done both, or you have done one extremely well and have wanted the other for years.
• You can talk about shop-level turnover without reaching for a benchmark, and about workers’ compensation without reaching out to a consultant.
• You are credible with a district manager at 7 a.m., a plant supervisor at Noon, and a CEO at 2 p.m. — and you do not change much between them.
• You know the difference between a policy that should be universal and one that should not, and you can defend the line.
• You want to build a small team of genuinely good people rather than a large one of adequate ones.
• You would rather improve the working system than replace it, and you can tell which is which.
• You are fluent in Paycom and have opinions about how much of it most companies never touch.
• The idea that 40% of this company belongs to the people you are hiring, coaching, and retaining changes how you would do the job.

This is probably not for you if…

• You want to stay in the lane you were sorted into.
• You need a single boss and a clean org chart to do your best work.
• You are looking for a CHRO title, or for this to become one in eighteen months.
• Spending real time in shops and on the plant floor sounds like something you would delegate.

What we are not

We are a 750-FTE, family- and employee-owned business, not a Fortune 500. Budgets have limits — every position on the plan above gets made on volume and risk, not on org chart ambition. Our retail workforce nearly doubles every summer while the plant builds ahead of it, which is two different problems arriving in the same week. Decisions get made quickly, which is wonderful right up until they aren’t. Some of what you would want already exists and is good; some of it is a spreadsheet somebody built in 2019 that has quietly become load bearing. And the work is in Cincinnati — in person, in the office, in the shops, and in the plant, because ice cream does not make itself.

If that reads like a list of problems, this is not your job. If it reads like a Tuesday, we should talk.

Come hold two businesses together

A retail company and a manufacturing company, one name, 2,000 people at peak, family-owned since 1870 and 40% owned by the people who do the work. Almost nobody gets handed both. Tell us what you would do with it.

Richard Graeter                              Chip Graeter                                  Craig Eten

Chief Executive Officer                   Chief Retail Officer                       Chief Financial Officer