Category Manager

Company Overview:

Peter’s Yard Wholesale Ltd is a growing bakery business making award-winning sourdough crackers and snacks. The company was founded in 2008 and is on a mission to be everyone’s favourite premium bakery brand. It now has annual sales at a retail value of over £10m with listings in Waitrose, Sainsbury’s, Ocado, Morrison’s, Booths, Wholefoods, Amazon and 3000 independent farm shops and delis. In July 2022, Peter’s Yard was acquired by Lotus Bakeries and is now part of their Natural Foods group.

Job purpose:

Reporting to the Category Development Director, the Category Manager can turn all of our category and shopper data into actionable insight with our retailers. This is a great opportunity for someone who is a couple of years’ into their career in Category Management - If you think you would get a buzz from spotting that valuable insight that unlocks growth opportunities for both Peter’s Yard and our retailers, this could be the role for you.

The team sits within the wider Commercial function of the business and is at an exciting stage in its development as not only have we invested a considerable amount in understanding our shoppers and consumers in the last couple of years but we are also expanding our portfolio into new and exciting categories. You’ll work closely with the relevant Commercial Manager for your customer accounts, and also work cross-functionally with the Marketing team to help the wider business understand us and our competitors

You will be highly motivated to work for a small but ambitious organisation, where you can be passionate, opened and team orientated to make a real difference.

Educated to degree level, you will be enthusiastic, commercially aware, and highly organised. Enjoying working in cross-functional teams, you are able to build strong relationships at all levels, have excellent communication skills and a keen eye for detail. You know how to get things done.

Key Responsibilities:

Customer Collaboration:

• Cement position as key independent advisor with your buyers, building and maintaining strong relationships
• Become the category champion by not only delivering monthly updates to your accounts, but by proactively analysing performance, consistently providing an insightful and challenging view on the category
• Flag risks and opportunities with distribution/ RoS to account managers and ensure robust recommendations on future promotional strategy or ranging, including the support of NPD
• Input into development and evolution of top-line category vision for customer use

Integrating insights into business decisions:

• Become the go-to person for insight into your allocated category, a real business expert in historic market data who stays ahead of bigger trends to make proactive recommendations that drive the business forward
• Lead analysis and drive insight for both the marketing and commercial teams on your category, focussing on; ranging, distribution, price and promotions, events and the NPD and EPD pipeline

Best in-class team, toolkits and reporting:

• Refresh monthly reports for your categories
• Develop full understanding of the excel sheets that sit behind the reports with the ability to edit and build
• Support the wider functions to ensure the report data is being used and understood by the business in the right way (e.g. through lunch and learns and category inductions)

Alongside living our values, here are the most important things we’re looking for from you:

1. Experienced at data analysis – not just churning the numbers but telling the story behind them too. We’d love someone who can help to train and coach the rest of the business to make the best possible use of our data and insights, so being self-sufficient when it comes to understanding the data will be key
2. Excellent communication skills, in particular presentation skills
3. Ability to build and develop great relationships with our buyers and merchandising contacts as a trusted expert
4. Outcome focused, results driven
5. Able to prioritise quickly in a fast moving, entrepreneurial environment
6. Happy to roll sleeves up and get stuck in – this is a small team and we need people who are happy to do everything from churning the data to developing the best way to do things to set ourselves up for future growth

Other essential requirements for this Category Manager role:

Previous experience of working in FMCG, ideally in Category Management or Insights either client or agency side

Experience using data providers like Nielsen, iRi, Kantar, Dunnhumby or Sainsburys insights platform