Sales & Demand Planning Manager

Amylu Foods is a high-growth, woman-founded, natural and health CPG company, known for its fresh ingredients and hand-crafted recipes. As pioneers in the chicken sausage category, we combine innovation with tradition, delivering bold and fresh flavors. Rooted in Chicago and celebrating 100+ years of craftsmanship, we continue to expand our product offerings and distribution nationwide, redefining the protein category. We are seeking passionate and talented leaders to join our rapidly growing company for our next phase of growth.

The Sales & Demand Planning Manager is a new, foundational role for Amylu, established to give Sales, Production, Procurement, Finance, Marketing, and Leadership a single, reliable demand signal to plan against. The role translates insights across syndicated retailer data, warehouse inbound and outbound data, and direct order/shipment data into reliable, actionable demand forecasts. It is an individual-contributor position with no direct reports at this time.

The Sales & Demand Planning Manager partners with Sales and Customer Service/Customer Supply Chain to shape retailer and distributor buying patterns and resolve order variances, with Marketing and Sales to size the demand lift from integrated marketing campaigns and trade plans, and with Product Development, Commercialization, and Project Management to contextualize expected volumes and timelines for new item launches. This person leads the S&OP process - including proactively flagging demand-side risk - and supports Annual Operating Plan (AOP) development with forecast models grounded in commercial inputs.

Success in this role looks like a forecast that the business trusts, and a demand signal that gets ahead of problems rather than reacting to them.

• Aggregate and interpret syndicated retailer/POS data (e.g., Circana/IRI, Nielsen), warehouse inbound and outbound movement data, and direct customer order/shipment history into a single, coherent demand signal.
• Build and maintain statistical and consensus forecasts at the appropriate SKU / customer / channel level, identifying trends, seasonality, promotional lift, and distribution changes.
• Own forecast accuracy and bias performance and report results and root causes to leadership on a regular cadence.
• Continuously evaluate and improve forecasting methods, tools, and data inputs to increase reliability and lead time of the demand signal.
• Provide the resulting forecast as the primary demand input to the Production, Procurement, and Finance planning processes.

• Partner with retailers and distributors, alongside Sales and Customer Service/Customer Supply Chain, to shape order timing and volume ahead of anticipated demand shifts.
• Translate forecast insights into early, specific flags for upcoming demand changes - promotions, seasonality, new item launches, distribution gains or losses - shared with customers and internal partners.
• Support joint business planning and customer conversations with data-driven recommendations that help retailers and distributors order in line with true underlying demand.

• Monitor incoming orders against forecast on an ongoing basis, flagging significant variances early rather than after they affect service or inventory.
• Collaborate with Customer Service/Customer Supply Chain and Sales to investigate root causes of variances - inventory position, promotional timing, distribution changes, order pattern shifts - and drive them to resolution.
• Build and maintain exception reporting and variance-tracking processes that give the team a consistent, proactive way to intervene before variances become problems.