Category Planner - Meat, Fish and Poultry
Salary: Competitive Plus Benefits
Location: London Store Support Centre and Home, London, EC1M 6HA
Contract type: Permanent
Business area: Food Commercial
Closing date: 18 September 2025
Requisition ID: 400018896
Why join us
Joining the Category Planning team at Sainsbury's means being part of a team that is always one step ahead, driving innovation and delivering exceptional value to our customers. As a Category Planner for Meat, Fish, and Poultry, you'll have the opportunity to collaborate with a diverse group of strategic thinkers and problem solvers, working alongside stakeholders from various departments to execute our promotional plans and maximise our category's impact. With your analytical skills and attention to detail, you'll play a vital role in shaping our promotional strategy, utilising data and insights to drive improvements and deliver on our corporate objectives. At Sainsbury's, we value work-life balance and provide a flexible working environment that empowers our colleagues to excel in their roles while enjoying a fulfilling personal life. Join us to make a difference and be part of a team that thrives on providing the best for our customers.
What you'll do
You will play a crucial role in driving the overall value proposition for the category. You will collaborate with various stakeholders, including Buyers, Marketing, Commercial Operations, and our supply base. Your expertise in in-depth analysis and meticulous attention to detail will be the driving force behind how we deliver against our corporate strategy. You will take ownership of specific deep dive projects, based on the category needs, including using various data inputs to identify opportunities to drive customer focussed recommendations. Using stakeholder management and presentation skills to align the cross functional teams on the recommendations and driving these to land in store. You will also play a key role in managing cross functional team meetings, including owning the organisation of the MFP quarterly cascades and the weekly Meat, Fish and Poultry leadership team surgery.
Who you are
You are a proactive and strategic thinker with a keen eye for identifying opportunities and making effective decisions in a fast-paced retail environment. With your solid understanding of retail and customer insights, you play a pivotal role in delivering the overall value proposition for the category. With excellent communication and influencing abilities, you collaborate closely with stakeholders across the organisation and build strong working relationships to ensure the successful implementation and communication of selling plans. You’re a self-starter with a strong sense of initiative, with strong analytical skills to convert large scale data to be able to effectively identify opportunities and use that to ‘tell a story’ and drive improvements. You are an organised individual who is comfortable with managing several workstreams and comfortable with ambiguity.
Essential Criteria
- Stakeholder management with confidence in public speaking, presenting to leadership teams, and collaborating across functions.
- PowerPoint expertise in creating and delivering impactful presentations to audiences.
- System knowledge of SIP, Kantar, and Nielsen and comfortable with using these platforms.
- Data analysis and storytelling skills to source, interpret, and translate data into actionable recommendations.
- Commercial acumen with a strong understanding of business drivers and decision-making impact.
We are committed to being a truly inclusive retailer, so you’ll be welcomed whoever you are and wherever you work. Around here, there’s always the chance to try something new - whether that’s as part of an evolving team or somewhere else across the business - and we take development seriously and promise to support you. We also recognise and celebrate colleagues when they go the extra mile and, where possible, offer flexible working. When you join our team, we’ll also offer you an amazing range of benefits. Here are some of them: Moments that matter are as important to us as they are to you which is why we give up to 26 weeks’ pay for maternity or adoption leave and up to 4 weeks’ pay for paternity leave.
Starting off with colleague discount, you'll be able to get 10% off at Sainsbury's, Argos, TU and Habitat after 4 weeks. This increases to 15% off at Sainsbury’s every Friday and Saturday and 15% off at Argos every pay day. We've also got you covered for your future with our pensions scheme and life cover. You'll also be able to share in our success as you may be eligible for a performance-related bonus of up to 20% of salary, depending on how we perform.
Your wellbeing is important to us too. You'll receive an annual holiday allowance, and you can buy additional holiday. We also offer other benefits that will help your money go further such as season ticket loans, interest free car loan of up to £10k, cycle to work scheme, health cash plans, pay advance (where you can access some of your pay before pay day) as well access to a great range of discounts from hundreds of other retailers. And if you ever need it there is also an Employee Assistance Programme, you will also be eligible for private healthcare too.
Please see www.sainsburys.jobs for a range of our benefits (note, length of service and eligibility criteria may apply).
