Category Manager

Category Manager, Cooked Chicken, M&S account

Cranswick Poultry is a specialty producers of delicious, cooked poultry ingredients and leading innovators in our industry, we create exciting, original products that meet the needs of today’s busy consumers. Working closely with customers, our bespoke chicken and turkey products offer creative and flavorsome lunchtime solutions.

Purpose of the role
- Provide inspiring Category Management support to our growing business with M&S in the cooked poultry category. Ensure we have category growth plans in place that are firmly focussed on creating points of difference for M&S through product quality, innovation and meeting changing customer needs in inspiring ways. Be passionate about food / customer trends and share insights with our team and the customer in a high energy way.

Work closely with our NPD and Commercial teams to strengthen our partnership with M&S, and ensure we are all aligned on our plans for growth..The key elements of the role are:

Be passionate about our business, our food and our customers

Improve category and customer understanding. Utilise a broad range of data analysis and market insight tools to build expert knowledge of the category and customers. Ensure a clear vision and plan is in place to meet the needs of customers and deliver short, medium and long term category growth. Be bold and ambitious with recommendations.

Build plans to support retailer partners with the management of product range, promotions, customer communication and execution across different retail channels.

Clearly communicate regular category updates to Cranswick and retailer stakeholders. Be clear in how performance relates to our objectives and how we should adjust our plan where  a leading voice in shaping the product development and innovation plan. Share food / consumer trends and insights in a high energy way, working closely with our NPD team and chefs to create a leading and stretching innovation pipeline.

Collaborate with commercial, product development and operations teams to drive growth initiatives.

Build collaborative relationships with relevant retailer stakeholders to help strengthen our existing partnership