Senior Director, Category Management

Shearer's Foods, founded in 1974 and headquartered in Massillon, OH, is a leading manufacturer of salty snacks, cookies, and crackers. Specializing in private label and co-manufacturing, Shearer's is the largest supplier of private brand salty snacks and second-largest supplier of private brand cookies and crackers.

With a strong focus on innovation, service, quality, and sustainability, Shearer's has been awarded the food industry's highest award for environmental sustainability, as well as multiple Supplier of the Year awards.

Operating 16 locations across North America and employing more than 5000 team members, Shearer's is driven by its core values of People, Grow, Impact and Win. The company mission is to deliver exceptional products and services that make snacking a time to celebrate for our customers, colleagues, and community.

At Shearer's Foods, we believe in a skills-first approach to recruitment and employment. This means focusing on what you can do and how you can grow, rather than traditional metrics alone. We are committed to adhering to anti-exclusion practices, removing barriers to access, and enhancing opportunities for all individuals based on merit and potential. Your skills, experience, and perspective are valuable-and we want to empower you to make your mark here with us.

Senior Director, Category Management & Insights

The Senior Director, Category Management & Insights a key enterprise leader responsible for Shearer's category thought leadership, developing category strategies based on data and insights, and customer-centric category leadership across the North American business. As a senior leader in the organization, this individual must assist in driving strong cross-functional collaboration to build strong partnerships with all Shearer's customers through best practices in insights and category leadership. This role leads and develops a high-performing team who support multiple product categories, customers, and channels.

This leader connects consumer insights, shopper behavior, category strategy, and merchandising execution to enable Sales effectiveness and Executive planning. Utilizing consumer and shopper insights, this leader will develop innovative solutions to deliver mutually beneficial business growth through strategy development, assortment recommendations, new item presentation, category business reviews, and all aspects of shelving and organizing products in a category friendly way online and offline.

Your seat at the table

• Establish Shearer's as a best-in-class category partner, grounded in consumer, shopper, and marketplace understanding. Informed by consumer trends, competitive dynamics, whitespace opportunities, and customer needs.
• Establish category management defining strategies to provide the framework for customer/account specific plans focused against merchandising, product assortment, placement, pricing, and promotion online and offline
• Serve as the category expert internally, creating compelling, actionable & measurable category plans and working collaboratively with cross-functional teams including sales, strategy, shopper marketing, and insights
• Develop and present comprehensive, concise, and objective category reviews incorporating shopper, consumer, retailer, syndicated and loyalty data
• Maintain tracking and reporting of company and customer assortments to monitor progress against goals, identify incremental opportunities to drive the business
• Present insights and provide strategic point of view at customer, internal, and executive meetings as well as ad hoc discussions as applicable
• Develop long-term partnership with customers through tactical and strategic customer engagement, including senior level
• Collaborate with customer team to expand category leadership in omnichannel and digital solutions
• Bring intellectual curiosity and a forward-thinking mentality to maintain awareness of market trends and competitor strategies and adjust Shearer's strategy accordingly
• Participates in the development of best practices in Category Management, and pursues the knowledge needed to improve departmental capabilities and professional agility

We are an equal opportunity employer, and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, pregnancy, age, national origin, disability status, genetic information, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.