Head of Insights & Category Innovation (Internal Applications Only) in Blagdon

Please note, we are accepting applications only from Yeo Valley co-owners. At Yeo Valley, we're about more than just making great food – we're here to Nurture & Nourish People & Planet by Making Great Food the Right Way. Forever. As a co-owned business, we invest in our people, encourage growth, and believe in doing things properly.

Yeo Valley Production owns multiple brands – Yeo Valley Organic, Tideford Organics, The Collective and Ubley. These brands operate in multiple categories (including dairy, soups & sauces, meat & ambient) and in multiple channels (retail, wholesale and food service).

As Head of Insights & Category Innovation you are responsible for generating relevant research, data and insights and turning this into clear strategies to help drive growth for our brands. This includes creating insight led, consumer-informed, 3-to 5-year category pipelines, through identification of white space opportunities and big bet platforms.

As an important member of the Marketing Leadership team, you will support the overall engagement and success of the whole Marketing team and work with the wider commercial functions to use insights to help shape our long-term commercial plans.

Your responsibilities will include:

• Consumer and Brand Insights
• Consumer Centric Culture: Acting as the voice of the consumer, championing consumer needs, and preferences, ensuring all work remains responsive to changing behaviours and how we can respond to drive positive outcomes.
• Consumer Insights Excellence: Develop a vision and roadmap for understanding consumer behaviour, aligning insights with the Business’s strategic goals, and anticipating future market trends. Ensure that consumer perspectives are embedded in decision-making across marketing, innovation, and the long-term business strategy. Define and prioritise the insights needed to deliver results.
• Research excellence: Lead best practice approach to consumer and concept research, ensuring effective spend and value-added results to drive clear decision-making and positive change. Strong ability to interpret both qualitative and quantitative data to uncover patterns, preferences, and emerging trends.
• Situational Analysis: Lead and oversee the tracking of wider macro and market trends, competitor activity, and emerging consumer behaviours to anticipate opportunities and risks, helping stay ahead of the competition. Lead the situational analysis element of the brand planning and multi-year planning cycles to bring together key insights both external and internally (6Cs). Uncover key opportunities and challenges for the Business across each category. Lead the prioritisation of these challenges and opportunities to create focus and clarity for the Business and our brands. Lead the work on understanding and tracking the health of our brands. Including commission research and consumer insight to support a better understanding of our brands to support the brand management team in the long-term brand building.
• Category Innovation
• Develop and embed a category innovation process that becomes an engine for long term growth across multiple categories and multiple brands.
• Culture of Innovation: Champion a culture of creativity, curiosity and thinking big. Create a test and learn approach to then back the leading ideas with biggest potential. Oversee ‘big bet’ opportunities and lead prioritisation based on opportunity, Business goals and the YVP house of brands strategy. Ensure excellent programme and project management approach to deliver great innovation opportunities.
• Strategic Planning: Develop and implement strategic initiatives that align with the business goals. This includes conducting market research and analysis to identify emerging trends and opportunities for growth. Lead the development of category innovation platforms including sizing of platforms and prioritisation. Ensure effective financial management of research activities.
• Innovation Management: Work with the Senior Head of Product & Innovation and other members of the Product team, and with the Brand Management Leads, to ensure an effective innovation process, from concepts to reality. This includes research & development initiatives and ensuring that innovative ideas are translated into actionable briefs.
• Collaboration: Work closely with leadership across multiple functions to ensure that innovation initiatives are integrated into the broader business strategy and closely linked to R&D / Product Development to deliver future feasibility requirements. This requires strong communication and interpersonal skills to foster collaboration across teams.
• Performance Monitoring: Evaluate the performance of strategic initiatives and innovation projects, providing insights and recommendations to inform decision-making processes.

This role sits within our Marketing Team and reports to the Marketing Director. The working hours are 40 hours per week Monday - Friday, and the role is based in our YVHQ offices in Blagdon, Somerset. Whilst we operate with flexible working principles, we expect our co-owners to be present in the office 2-3 days a week.

Essential:

• Expert knowledge in insights/innovation/category/commercial
• Knowledge of consumer insights and data agencies
• Proven track record in writing, implementing and delivering insights and actions
• Excellent project management skills and approach
• Proven track record in creativity and visioning
• Excellent presentation and communication skills, both written and verbal

Why should I join the family?

We’re independent, British and proud to be making the highest quality yogurts, desserts and ice cream under the Yeo Valley brand and for many of the UK’s major retailers. Operating from four dairies and two logistics centres in Somerset and Devon, we employ over 1900 staff and produce more than 25% of the UK’s packaged yogurt. We’re sure you don’t need convincing, but there’s a whole host of benefits that we offer. It goes without saying that you'll have access to free parking, top of the range personal protection equipment (PPE) and your own locker. You'll also receive the following:

• Competitive holiday allowance
• Non-contributory pension scheme
• Life cover
• Healthcare cash back plan
• Cycle to work scheme
• Subsidised Yeo Valley products and services
• Preferential rates with our partners
• Learning and development opportunities; we’re committed to ensuring all of our employees have the chance to grow

Our closing dates are a guide for when the application window should close, although we may close the advert sooner if we can. So, we recommend you get your application in straight away – and don’t miss the opportunity to join us! Unfortunately, we’re not able to provide employment sponsorship to candidates at this moment in time. Please note that Yeo Valley do not accept speculative agency applications; we will only accept applications from preferred suppliers that have been submitted to us via our recruitment portal at the point of instruction.