Demand Planner

Wibble is an ambitious, fast-growing food brand bringing fun, flavour, and innovation to the market. With an expanding presence across retail and e-commerce, we're focused on developing exciting products, building strong retail partnerships, and scaling our business.

As we grow, accurate demand forecasting and effective inventory planning are critical to our success. We're looking for a proactive, analytical, and exceptionally detail-oriented DemandPlanner to join our team and help ensure we have the right products, in the right quantities, at the right time.

Working closely with our Senior Operations & Supply Chain Manager and Sales team, you'll play a key role in improving forecast accuracy, optimising stock levels, and identifying opportunities to use AI and automation to make our planning processes smarter and more efficient.

What You'll Be Doing

• 📈 Demand forecasting: Develop and maintain demand forecasts across retail, e-commerce, and wholesale channels, using historical sales, trends, promotions, and commercial input.
• 🤝 Sales collaboration: Work closely with the Sales team to understand customer forecasts, retailer expectations, promotional activity, new product launches, and commercial opportunities. Align demand forecasts with sales plans and challenge assumptions where necessary.
• 📊 Sales analysis: Analyse sales performance, identify trends, seasonality, and variances against forecast, and provide insights to support commercial and planning decisions.
• 📦 Inventory & stock planning: Monitor stock levels, stock cover, and availability to ensure we maintain the right balance between customer service and working capital.
• 🛒 Retailer & customer planning: Support demand planning for major retail customers, including Tesco, Sainsbury's, Waitrose, and other key accounts.
• 🧾 Production & purchasing planning: Translate forecasts into production and purchasing requirements, helping ensure ingredients, packaging, and finished goods are available when needed.
• 🔍 Forecast accuracy & reporting: Maintain planning reports, track forecast accuracy and bias, investigate discrepancies, and highlight risks or opportunities.
• 🤖 AI & process improvement: Explore how AI, automation, and technology can improve forecasting, reporting, data analysis, and planning efficiency.
• 🌍 Continuous improvement: Identify opportunities to reduce waste, improve stock efficiency, minimise excess inventory, and optimise supply chain costs.

What We're Looking For

• 🔍 Exceptional attention to detail: Highly accurate and thorough, with a strong focus on data integrity, checking assumptions, and identifying inconsistencies in forecasts and reports.
• 📈 Analytical & numerical: Confident working with data, spreadsheets, sales trends, and forecasting models.
• 📊 Excel skills: Comfortable using Excel or Google Sheets to analyse data, build reports, and manage forecasts.
• 🤖 AI-curious: Enthusiastic about using AI and automation to improve forecasting, analysis, and planning processes. No expert knowledge required, but a willingness to experiment and learn is essential.
• 🎯 Proactive & solutions-focused: Able to identify potential stock issues, investigate variances, and recommend practical solutions.
• 🔗 Relevant experience: Some experience in demand planning, supply chain, inventory management, operations, or data analysis, ideally within food, FMCG, retail, or e-commerce.
• 🤝 Strong communicator: Confident collaborating with Sales and other teams, communicating planning assumptions, risks, and recommendations.
• 🚀 Entrepreneurial mindset: Enjoys working in a fast-paced, growing business and taking ownership of improving processes.

Bonus Points If You Have

• ➕ Experience with demand planning, forecasting, or inventory management systems.
• 📊 Advanced Excel skills, including pivot tables, lookups, and forecasting tools.
• 🛒 Experience working with major retailers such as Tesco, Sainsbury's, Waitrose, or Holland & Barrett.
• 📦 Familiarity with Shopify, Unleashed, or similar systems.
• ⚡ Experience using AI or automation for forecasting, reporting, or data analysis.

🌟 We're looking for someone who loves working with data, gets the details right, thinks ahead, and is excited about using technology and collaborating with Sales to help Wibble forecast smarter and grow sustainably.