Primary Supplier Development Assistant in London

Why join us

Joining our Primary Supplier team as a Development Assistant offers an exciting opportunity to contribute to the growth and success of our organisation. As part of our team, you will play a pivotal role in supporting the development of our recruitment and retention strategy for Food & Non-Food suppliers, specifically focusing on the Primary Distribution route to market. You will have the chance to build strong relationships with our Category teams, Primary Operations, and the Supply Base, ensuring a sustainable recruitment strategy and maintaining viable long-term relationships with existing suppliers. With a strong emphasis on collaboration, communication, and attention to detail, this role provides the perfect platform to make a meaningful impact and contribute to our ongoing success. Join us and be part of a team that values work-life balance and encourages flexibility while working towards our business goals.

What you'll be doing

As a Development Assistant for our Primary Supplier team, you will play a vital role in supporting the development of the recruitment and retention strategy for all Food & Non-Food suppliers utilising the Primary Distribution route to market. Your main responsibilities will include building strong relationships with Category teams, Primary Operations, and the Supply Base to proactively develop a sustainable recruitment strategy for suppliers, considering end-to-end route to market opportunities. You will also provide account support and maintain viable long-term relationships with existing suppliers, collaborate with the category and future brands teams to assess the best route to market for all suppliers, administer changes to supplier rates, resolve charging queries, and maintain management information to support stakeholder engagement. Your strong attention to detail, ability to prioritise workload, excellent communication skills, and ability to build and influence relationships both internally and externally will be key to succeeding in this role.

Who you are

As a Development Assistant for our Primary Supplier team, you are a detail-oriented and proactive professional who plays a crucial role in supporting the development of our recruitment and retention strategy for Food & Non-Food suppliers utilising the Primary Distribution route to market. With your strong attention to detail, you ensure accurate administration of supplier rates and resolve any charging queries, contributing to the smooth and efficient operation of supplier relationships. Your ability to prioritise workload and work collaboratively enables you to build strong relationships with internal stakeholders, such as Category teams and Primary Operations, as well as external suppliers, ensuring sustainable and long-term partnerships. With your excellent communication skills and ability to influence where appropriate, you contribute to effective decision-making and the success of our recruitment strategy.

Responsibilities
We believe in providing meaningful work and achieving a real work/life balance. Here, you'll find both. Our Supply Chain team is the engine room for getting thousands of products from farms and factories to our millions of customers every day. We leverage insight and data to anticipate customer needs, ensuring they get what they want, when they need it. You'll be part of a team that is data-driven and judgement-focused, always the first to identify and address any issues or ambiguities. A culture of collaboration, customer obsession, and continuous improvement drives us to deliver market-leading product availability and operational excellence, and fuels our innovation. Our Supply Chain team calls for people who champion change, are customer-obsessed, data-driven, and excel at collaborating and communicating effectively - because those people can go a very long way.

Qualifications

We are committed to being a truly inclusive retailer so you’ll be welcomed whoever you are and wherever you work. Around here, there’s always the chance to try something new — whether that’s as part of an evolving team or somewhere else across the business - and we take development seriously and promise to support you. We also recognise and celebrate colleagues when they go the extra mile and, where possible, offer flexible working. When you join our team, we’ll also offer you an amazing range of benefits. Here are some of them:

Starting off with colleague discount, you'll be able to save 10% on your shopping online and instore at Sainsbury's, Argos, TU and Habitat, and we regularly increase the discount to 15% at points during the year. We've also got you covered for your future with our pensions scheme and life cover. You'll also be able to share in our success as you may be eligible for a performance-related bonus of up to 5% of salary, depending on how we perform.

Your wellbeing is important to us too. You'll receive an annual holiday allowance and you can buy up to an additional week's holiday. We also offer other benefits that will help your money go further such as season ticket loans, cycle to work scheme, health cash plans, salary advance (where you can access some of your pay before pay day) as well access to a great range of discounts from hundreds of other retailers. And if you ever need it there is also an employee assistance programme.

Moments that matter are as important to us as they are to you which is why we give up to 26 weeks’ pay for maternity or adoption leave and up to 4 weeks’ pay for paternity leave.

Please see www.sainsburys.jobs for a range of our benefits (note, length of service and eligibiity criteria may apply).