Strategic Customer & Projects Manager in London

A genuinely different opportunity within the UK fresh produce sector. We are working with a highly successful, established and ambitious fresh produce business to appoint a Strategic Customer & Projects Manager into a newly defined and influential position. This isn't a conventional Commercial Manager role. Nor is it a traditional Project Manager position. Instead, we're looking for an exceptional individual who can join the dots. Someone who can build trusted relationships across the fresh produce supply chain from growers and development partners through to major UK retailers, understand what matters to each of them, and bring together the right people to turn conversations, ideas and opportunities into results.

Reporting to the Chief Commercial Officer, you'll operate across a remarkably broad agenda encompassing: Growers | Innovation | Sustainability & CSR | Consumer & Marketing | Customer Partnerships | Ways of Working.

The Opportunity: At the heart of the role is one straightforward ambition: To create stronger connections between the organisation's growing community, its customers and its wider strategic priorities. The grower network is fundamental to the success of the business. You will invest time in understanding growers' businesses, capabilities, challenges and ambitions, helping to build open, consistent and mutually valuable relationships. You'll become a trusted and visible point of contact improving communication, encouraging the exchange of ideas and ensuring that growers are appropriately involved in conversations about future customer requirements, product development, sustainability and long-term supply.

At the same time, you'll develop a detailed understanding of the organisation's key retailers and strategic partners: what matters to them today, where their priorities are heading and how the business and its growers can respond. One day you could be meeting growers to understand crop plans, production challenges or development opportunities. The next, you might be discussing sustainability objectives with a retailer, exploring future product innovation, reviewing consumer insight or coordinating a project involving several internal functions and external partners.

Your Remit: Your responsibilities will span six connected strategic areas:

• Growing Community: Developing deeper, more consistent relationships with the business's fresh produce growing community and helping to create a genuinely best-in-class grower network. You'll spend time getting to know growers and their businesses, understanding their capabilities, pressures, investment priorities and future ambitions. You'll help improve the quality and consistency of communication between growers and the wider organisation, ensuring information flows effectively in both directions.
• Innovation & Development: Building relationships with growers, breeders and key development partners to identify future opportunities and give the business early visibility of exciting new products, varieties and growing techniques.
• Sustainability & CSR: Understanding the evolving sustainability expectations of customers, growers and the wider market, then coordinating activity across the appropriate teams and partners.
• Consumer & Marketing: Developing an understanding of changing consumer behaviour and using insight to identify opportunities for category growth, innovation and stronger customer propositions.
• Customer Partnerships: Working alongside the commercial and customer teams to understand retailer priorities and strengthen the quality of the organisation's strategic relationships.
• Ways of Working: Improving communication, collaboration and accountability across growers, internal teams, customers and external partners.

Who Are We Looking For? We're deliberately keeping an open mind about background and current job title. You could currently be working in grower relations, agriculture, commercial, category, customer strategy, marketing, innovation, sustainability, supply chain, project management or a broader strategic role. Fresh produce or wider food/FMCG experience would be highly relevant, particularly if you have worked closely with growers, suppliers and major UK retailers.

You may already have direct experience of grower relationships. Alternatively, you might bring a strong understanding of agricultural supply chains and the credibility, curiosity and interpersonal skills required to build trusted relationships within the growing community. More important is your ability to demonstrate:

• Exceptional relationship-building and communication skills.
• The ability to build credibility with growers, customers and senior internal stakeholders.
• A genuine interest in growers, agricultural supply chains and long-term partnerships.
• Strong commercial awareness without being defined solely by a traditional sales remit.
• The ability to understand a broad and sometimes complex agenda.
• Natural curiosity and an appetite to learn.
• The confidence to ask intelligent questions and challenge constructively.
• The ability to influence without relying on hierarchy.
• Strong project management and organisational capability.
• A talent for bringing different people, perspectives and functions together.
• A track record of taking ideas and turning them into delivered outcomes.

We're looking for someone with drive, ambition, resilience, curiosity and credibility but also someone who values relationships, listens well and understands that progress across a complex supply chain depends on trust.

Why Consider It? Because roles with this breadth don't come along very often. You'll have exposure across the entire journey from grower, crop and product development through to consumer insight, retailer relationships and business strategy. Crucially, you'll have the opportunity to strengthen the connection between an important fresh produce business and the growing community on which its success is built - helping create relationships that are more collaborative, transparent and focused on the future.

You’ll report directly to the Chief Commercial Officer and have the visibility and support required to make a genuine impact. This could particularly suit someone who has built a strong career within one area of food, agriculture or fresh produce and now wants the opportunity to broaden their influence across an entire business and its supply chain.