Director of Foodservice, North America

Director, Food service, North America

Nielsen-Massey Vanillas (NMV) is seeking a dynamic and strategic Director of Food service to lead our growth initiatives across key food service channels including commercial/full-service restaurants, hospitality/hotel and lodging, and non-commercial segments (e.g., education, healthcare, B&I). This role will also oversee broadline distribution management, ensuring optimal product availability, pricing, and promotional execution through national and regional distributors. The ideal candidate will bring deep industry knowledge, strong relationships, and a proven track record of driving revenue and brand presence in the food service space.

This individual will be responsible for developing and executing sales strategies, building strong relationships with key distributors and operators, and driving revenue growth across national and regional accounts. The ideal candidate will have deep experience in the food service industry, a strong understanding of consumer trends, and a passion for delivering exceptional customer experiences. The role will work to lead our account management efforts by prospecting and building out segment and customer mapping.

The Food service Director will assist in a variety of cross-functional projects providing organizational and administrative support.

Key responsibilities include delivering/exceeding NMV annual sales volume and operating profit objectives in food service with a focus on broadline distributor partnerships, developing strategic plans that encompass multi-year growth plans outlining revenue, profit potential, and go-to-market strategy, channel strategy and development, developing and executing strategic plans to grow sales in commercial, hospitality, and non-commercial food service channels, identifying and prioritizing high-potential accounts and segments for targeted growth, collaborating with marketing and innovation teams to tailor product offerings and messaging for food service applications, building and maintaining strong relationships with key broadline distributors, managing pricing, trade programs, and promotional calendars to drive distributor engagement and performance, monitoring distributor compliance, inventory levels, and service metrics to ensure consistent execution, leading customer presentations, negotiations, and joint business planning with strategic accounts, partnering with culinary and R&D teams to support menu ideation and product integration, attending industry trade shows, conferences, and customer events to represent the brand and identify new opportunities, collaborating with operations, finance, and supply chain to ensure alignment on forecasts, capacity, and service expectations, providing input into innovation pipeline and go-to-market strategies for food service-specific products, serving as the voice of the food service customer internally, advocating for their needs and opportunities, managing and attending vendor shows for Broad Line distributors, partnering with the Marketing team to develop efficient marketing support vehicles and selling stories to drive sales growth with existing and new Broad Line distribution partners, building demand forecasts that are accurate and updated and are reviewed internally for maximum accuracy, and traveling 50% or more dependent on customer needs and opportunities.

Personal characteristics include organization, results-oriented, intellectual, change management, leadership capability, and communication skills.