Category Development Manager in St Albans

Lotus Natural Foods, the healthy snacking division of Lotus Bakeries, has great ambitions for all our brands, ensuring that we deliver sustainable growth over the long-term. We believe that taste and quality are 100% of what underpins us as brand leaders within our categories. To date, we have achieved so much, but there is still plenty of room to grow further, and that means we need more brilliant people who share an ambition for making a difference.

About the Role

We’re looking for a talented Category Manager who can turn all our category and shopper data into actionable insight, both within our business and with our retailer customers. This is a great opportunity for someone who is a couple of years into their career in Category Management and ready for the next step. If you think you would enjoy discovering valuable insights to unlock growth opportunities for Kiddylicious and our retailers, this could be the role for you.

The Category team sits within the wider commercial function of the business, and you’ll work closely with the relevant commercial manager for your customer accounts, and also cross-functionally with the brand and shopper marketing teams to help the wider business understand the category, our brands, and those of our competitors. This role requires you to get stuck into detailed data analysis, and then step back to see the big picture and deliver actionable insights. These insights and recommendations then need to be communicated clearly and concisely to both an internal audience and our leading retail customers.

Key focus areas of the role:

• As a business expert in the continuous NIQ, panel data, dunnhumby and SIP category data we purchase, you will provide an ongoing understanding to the wider business of what is driving both our brands and the competition.
• Making recommendations to both the business and our key retail customers (Top 4 accounts) on range, fixture, price and promotions to help unlock future sales growth.
• Building and maintaining strong relationships with key buyers and merchandising contacts in order for them to trust and implement your recommendations.
• Providing analysis and insight for the Commercial team to take directly to retailers.
• Sharing monthly reporting internally and externally to ensure that everyone understands the category and to enable the business to make strategic decisions based on data.

Customer collaboration:

• Develop a position as a key independent advisor with your buyers; building and maintaining strong relationships.
• Deliver monthly updates to your accounts and proactively analyse their 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 strategies and ranging options, including NPD sell-in.
• Input into development and evolution of our top-line Category Vision that we share with our retailers.

Integrating insights into Business Decisions:

• Become the go-to person for insight into your allocated NBF brand and retailers; 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, focusing on: ranging, distribution, price and promotions, events, and the NPD and EPD pipeline.

Best-in-class team, toolkits and reporting:

• Work with our data agencies to ensure that we maintain our data quality.
• Refresh and maintain monthly category reporting, updating them to cover NPD and any other relevant new content.
• Support the teams to make sure the report data is being used and understood by the business in the right way.

Reporting into Head of Category Kiddylicious UK

About You

Alongside living our TOP values, we are looking for someone who:

• Has Right-To-Work within the UK (without sponsorship).
• Has a minimum education to Bachelor’s Degree level.
• Has experience in data analysis - not just churning the numbers but telling the story behind them too.
• Has excellent communication skills, particularly presentation skills and story-telling.
• Can build and develop great relationships as a trusted expert, both internally and with our buyers and merchandising contacts at retail customers.
• Able to prioritise quickly in a fast-moving, entrepreneurial environment.
• Happy to roll sleeves up and get stuck in - we are a small category team and business.

Other essential requirements for this Category Manager role:

• Previous experience of working in FMCG, ideally in Category Management or Insights either supplier or agency side.
• Experience using data providers like Circana, Kantar, Nielsen, Dunnhumby Shop and/or Nectar 360 SIP.

Please note this role is a full-time position at our beautiful offices in St Albans, with four days a week spent on-site.