Category Lead - AFH

Are you looking for new challenges and personal growth within Coca-Cola Europacific Partners? Then we have a great opportunity for you!
Do you have a personality with the power to influence and connect?
Can you sustain the pace to keep on growing?
Will you make an impact with your desire to win?

AFH Category Lead

Location: Uxbridge

Contract type: Permanent

What you become part of:

In an increasingly competitive and challenging market place, at CCEP we see the role of the Category Development as pivotal to delivering our business performance. The team's primary objective is to deliver an inspiring and insightful vision for the Soft Drinks category, today and in the future. In order to unlock growth we need our team to be strategic, long term focused, analytical and great influencers to work in partnership with our customers and key internal stakeholders. Reporting in to the Director for Category Management you will responsible for the development and implementation of a category strategy to unlock growth potential across the AFH customers. CCEP Category Development is ranked #1 in the Advantage Group Survey by AFH customers, you will lead a team of 10 category managers and executives to develop collaborative plans with our customers which unlock long term Soft Drinks category growth.

What to expect:

• Support in the development of a clear vision for the Soft Drinks category, creating a framework for growth with a clear and relevant category strategy for all AFH environments and key customers
• Develop strategic plans with key accounts that identify opportunities to drive performance
• Collaborate with the Category Strategy team to co-create and shape future, long term drivers of growth for AFH channel
• Drive CCEP strategic thinking and value creation story with Retailers by engaging with Buyers, Merchandisers and Category Directors
• Support your team to roll out range relays, macro space resets, future thinking around channel strategies and Customer Business Planning Days
• Establish and maintain a mutually beneficial customer contact strategy and help broaden our engagement with our Grocery customers
• Work in collaboration with key internal stakeholders (including National Accounts, R&MGM and Insights) to ensure alignment and execution against the category and brand strategies
• Lead the Annual Business Planning process from a Category perspective
• Manage and support the category managers and executives to develop their capability
• Ensure delivery of quality category analysis reports, delivering insight to our customers on a regular basis
• Manage relationships with external providers (category and customer specific) to ensure we have access to the highest quality data available for our customers and environments.
• Drive change by automating range reviews, launch strategic projects such as channel strategy and Platinum store across key customers

Skills & Experience:

• Previous FMCG Category Management experience and strong knowledge of the AFH channel is desirable
• People management experience, with strong leadership skills
• Demonstrate passion, proactive ownership and resilience for growing the category
• Strong listening and influencing skills at various levels within the organisation and with customers
• Ability to influence diverse stakeholder groups
• Behaviours: Drive for innovation, change, agile, curious mind set, resilience, determination, and drive are key
• Drive for innovation, change and agile ways of working
• In-depth knowledge of Nielsen, GfK and other data providers
• We are encouraging applications from candidates who have previous experience of collaborating with large customers, are highly numerate and analytic

We are Coca-Cola Europacific Partners (CCEP) – a dedicated team of 42,000 people, serving customers in 31 countries, who work together to make, move and sell some of the world’s most loved drinks.
We are a global business and one of the leading consumer goods companies in the world. We help our 2.1 million customers grow, and we are constantly investing in exciting new products, innovative technologies and fresh ideas. This helps us to delight the 600 million people who enjoy our drinks every day.

From gender, age and ethnicity to sexual orientation and different abilities, we welcome people from all walks of life and empower unique perspectives. We recognise we’ve got some way to go, but we’ll get there with the support of our people. It’s them who drive our future growth. To find out more about what it’s like to work at and our culture we would welcome you to speak to one of our employees on our live chat platform, just click here to speak to an insider

We recognise some people prefer not to participate in alcohol related sales, interactions, or promotions. If that’s true for you – please raise this with your talent acquisition contact who will advise you on whether this role includes activities related to our alcohol portfolio.