Director Category Development

The J.R. Simplot Company is a diverse, privately held organization, with roots firmly planted in agriculture and agriculture-related businesses. The J.R. Simplot Company is a true farm-to-table company with operations that touch every aspect of agriculture, including seed production, farming and ranching, plant sciences, fertilizer manufacturing, food processing, commercial product development, and distribution.

Summary

The Director of Category Development's primary purpose is to provide leadership of and a best practice approach for the Category Development function which will drive profitable growth for both Simplot, and our customers, across our portfolio of categories.

This is done through ensuring each product category within our potato, vegetable and fruit categories has a robust and consistent approach to a data-led 3-5-year growth strategy, underpinned by insights, analytics, and recommendations. These category growth strategies will serve as a roadmap for growth across all markets, sales channels and customer segments and will support the sales and marketing teams in their development of short-term executional plans.

This role will work closely with all marketing functions, sales, demand planning, and category strategy teams to provide tight connectivity to our category development process and will be responsible for formalizing processes that will drive alignment across the organization.

A strong understanding of market dynamics, customer needs, and industry trends, along with excellent strategic thinking, analytical skills, and the ability to build and maintain relationships with key stakeholders is critical to the success of this role. Additionally, the Director will manage and lead a team made up of Category Development Manager(s).

Key Responsibilities

Total Category strategy ownership

• Leads in the creation of 3-5-year category strategies
• Seamlessly aggregates all individual category insights into a total category (product, channel, and segment) perspective, which guides the development of short-term category growth plans
• Actively explore untapped opportunities in the application of category thinking and better market data utilization
• Leads the capture of category development thinking and market growth expectations into our longer-term volume and forecasts

Drive a High Performing Category Development Team

• Ongoing consistent capability build of the Category Development team, leveraging best practice (and situational leadership as required) across the team and a consistent approach across categories
• Support the Category Development Manager(s) to provide category/customer insights, analytics and recommendations to the sales and marketing team to enable the development of the 0-3 year plans
• Ensure the Category Development Managers are working with the Sales and Marketing Team to proactively identify business development opportunities' highlighting changes in competitor activity and the potential impacts on the business both in the short and long term.

Stakeholder Management

• Strong cross-functional collaboration with Product Marketing, Insights, Customer Marketing, Category Strategy and Sales leadership to ensure that industry, customer, and competitor insights are being appropriately observed and assessed

Typical Education

• Bachelor's Degree (B.A. or B.S.) from 4 year college or university

Relevant Experience

• 8+ years related experience and/or training
• Demonstrated ability to develop cross-functional relationships
• Ability to understand and analyze detailed information and deliver insights
• Previous experience managing teams preferred
• Previous experience presenting to senior leadership and customers.
• #LI-MG1

Job Requisition ID: 14718

Travel Required: Less than 10%

Location(s): Simplot Headquarters - Boise

Country: United States

**The J.R. Simplot Company is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer and will consider all qualified applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, ancestry, age, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, genetic information, physical or mental disability, medical condition, sexual orientation, military or veteran status, marital status, or any other protected status. **