Category Buyer

Join to apply for the Category Buyer role at Hotel Chocolat

At Hotel Chocolat, we pride ourselves on delivering beautiful, innovative packaging that delights our customers, reflects the premium quality of our brand, and supports our commitment to sustainability. We are looking for a Category Buyer to join our Procurement Team, supporting the Packaging Sourcing Manager in driving both the operational and strategic elements of our packaging agenda.

In this role, you will own the packaging supply base and associated spend – taking a leading role in delivering our procurement packaging strategy, optimising growth, hitting environmental / social targets, ensuring best value and quality, whilst mitigating supply failure and driving continuous improvement.

Working at the heart of our new product development and innovations pipelines, you will help to source and deliver the packaging solutions that bring our products to life. From engaging suppliers, to managing critical timelines and ensuring our packaging meets the highest standards of sustainability, quality, cost efficiency and overall value. Alongside this exciting innovation work, you’ll take ownership of the essential administration that underpins our sourcing activities, navigating our current systems, and identifying opportunities to simplify and add value.

As well as a competitive salary and a range of company benefits including private healthcare cover, enhanced maternity and paternity leave and company pension contributions, you’ll receive 50% discount on all products, and a 70% discount for you and your guests when you stay at our Rabot Estate hideaway on the paradise island of Saint Lucia.

Here at Hotel Chocolat, we’ve adopted hybrid working
. This means you’ll join us on site for three days a week
, and for the other two days – you can work from wherever you like! The main on‑site location for this role will be our Distribution Centre ‘Alpha’, in St. Neots
, Cambridgeshire, with occasional travel as needed to our Chocolate Factory ‘Hadley Park’ in Huntingdon
, Cambridgeshire, and Distribution Centre ‘Beta’ in Harpole
, Northampton.

Please note that due to the upcoming holiday period, interviews will be commencing from Monday 12th January 2026.

• Manage a diverse range of direct packaging product categories with up to £10m spend across multiple suppliers, to deliver strategies and results that mitigate risk, optimise value, and develop great suppliers selected for sustainable scalable solutions
• Coordinate and effectively influence multiple stakeholder groups, from our operational teams to senior management, ensuring alignment and smooth delivery of projects and key initiatives.
• Work with our development teams, to source and develop new and existing suppliers for both NPD and continuous improvement projects, with an emphasis on evolving our portfolio to be even more environmentally and socially responsible
• Identifying and ensuring best value throughout NPD, EPD and our ordering cycles.
• Manage competitive bidding process, tendering and contract management via our sourcing platform. Analyse data to present strategic sourcing routes that align to business strategies
• Responsible for the management and continuity of packaging raw material forward orders, in collaboration with Suppliers and Supply Planning
• Manage and raise ad hoc purchase orders relating to packaging such as tooling and originations
• Create, maintain and update project and procurement trackers on a regular basis
• Own supplier KPIs from a procurement lens and initiate supplier development plans where appropriate
• Own development and delivery of value and savings pipeline for the packaging categories
• Understand the external market environment, gather market intelligence, benchmark against the external world and understand price drivers to influence requirements and specifications internally and externally. Gather and utilise market intelligence to inform price forecasting database
• Deploy our SRM framework to maximise supplier capabilities to drive performance, originality of innovation and ethics. Conduct regular supplier reviews.
• Own category regular reporting, to measure…