Global Senior Buyer Dairy Ingredients

Short Intro and About the Job

Hoofddorp/Hybrid

As a strategic leader within Danone’s global procurement organization, the Global Senior Buyer Dairy Ingredients is responsible for shaping and executing the global sourcing strategy for Whey & Derivatives. This role drives value creation through deep market intelligence, supplier innovation, and strategic stakeholder engagement across geographies. Operating in a complex, fast-paced environment, the role is pivotal in delivering sustainable business results, mitigating risk, and advancing Danone’s ESG and Impact Journey objectives.

• Define and lead the global category strategy for Whey and Derivatives, aligned with business priorities and stakeholder needs.
• Translate market insights and cost structure analysis into actionable sourcing strategies.
• Build and maintain a robust pipeline of productivity and value-creation initiatives.
• Lead end-to-end sourcing processes, including go-to-market strategy, tendering, negotiation, and supplier award decisions.
• Ensure strategic supplier engagement post-tender to deliver long-term value.
• Oversee execution of commercial agreements in alignment with legal and compliance standards.
• Influence and collaborate with senior internal stakeholders across R&I, Quality, Operations, Finance, and Legal.
• Develop and maintain strategic supplier relationships, leveraging SRM to drive innovation and performance.
• Represent Danone externally with suppliers, farmers, industry boards, and regulatory bodies.
• Own financial planning and forecasting for the category, including budget alignment, variance tracking, and savings delivery.
• Proactively identify and mitigate category-specific and macro-level risks.
• Champion ESG initiatives within the category, embedding sustainability metrics into supplier partnerships.
• Contribute to the broader Danone Impact Journey through responsible sourcing and innovation.

Meet your future manager! You will report to RichardMCGUIRE, Global Category Dourcing Director Whey&Derivatives.

To be successful in this role, you have:

• Bachelor’s Degree in procurement, business, food science.
• Significant working experience in strategic procurement (fast paced CPG/ingredients); delivers on cost, risk, and service.
• Enjoy working in a fast-paced entrepreneurial environment and has creativity to solve problems and oriented for value creation.
• Pragmatism, "hands on" mentality, with strategic business approach.
• Ability to navigate in ambiguous environment, tenacity with strong adaptation and relationship capabilities, to gain credibility and create an efficient network within regions and suppliers.
• Fluent in English

Skills and competencies:

• In-depth experience in strategic sourcing of relevant categories
• Knowledge and experience of world-class category management and sourcing practices from one or several world-class companies.
• Experienced in managing sourcing categories across multiple geographies.
• Strong commercial and business acumen and negotiation skills.
• Strong results-orientation and proven track record of consistent outstanding performance and results delivery
• Strong ability to lead, influence, collaborate, and effectively engage multiple stakeholders.
• Strong analytical and quantitative skills.
• Presence to engage effectively with senior supplier stakeholders.
• Creative and continuously looking for stretching value-adding opportunities.
• Resilience and collaboration.
• Proven ability to build strong supplier relationships to achieve business goals.
• Experienced in autonomously managing all procurement aspects of a category.

At Danone we are committed to our mission "bringing health, through food to as many people as possible". Working together to make sure that our brands, like Hipro, Nutricia, Alpro, Activia, Nutrilon and Evian, create real benefits for people, communities and the planet. You will be part of one of the largest Certified B Corps in the world.

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