Beverage Category Manager

Five Star Breaktime Solutions, headquartered in Chattanooga, TN, is a premier away-from-home food and beverage retail solutions provider for employers and other commercial, institutional, and educational locations.

Five Star is an industry leader in micro-markets, full-line vending, pantry, coffee and water services, full-service dining, catering, fresh food production, secured delivery, and sustainable products serving customers in ten states including Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Ohio, and Tennessee.

Founded in 1993, Five Star has grown to one of the largest privately held convenience services operators in the United States and is the largest franchisee of Canteen, a Compass Group company.

Role Summary:

As the Beverage Category Manager, you will lead and drive growth in our ready-to-drink non-alcoholic beverage business. You will be responsible for the creation and implementation of category plans and business strategies that optimize revenue and profit across carbonated soft drinks, energy, sports drinks, water, tea, coffee, and milk.

This highly visible role will be the subject matter expert supporting our Five Star sales teams, senior leadership, and other departments through best practices and processes to drive category development, segmented merchandising, optimal portfolio mix, price/package architecture, promotional strategies, and supporting tools for sales execution.

If offered the role you must be willing and able to relocate to the Chattanooga, TN area.

Responsibilities:

• Serve as the beverage portfolio thought leader across the organization managing Five Star’s business needs in all non-alcoholic beverage categories.
• Represent Five Star’s business interests through collaboration, negotiation, planning, and accountability with external business partners to strengthen relationships, align on category strategy, and drive value creation.
• Monitor industry, channel, and shopper trends to refine product and category strategies, identifying deficiencies, root causes, and opportunities to solve and drive revenue growth.
• Assess category performance from various internal and external syndicated data sources to identify and develop plans based on key opportunities, risks, and innovation.
• Develop forward-looking category growth strategies, price/package architecture, merchandising recommendations, and promotional plans to drive optimal assortment.
• Partner with internal teams including business intelligence to design the right suite of Power BI solutions for beverage category scorecards, KPIs, and dashboards.
• Responsible for assessing current category offerings, position in the marketplace, developing and communicating strategies as well as gaining buy-in across the organization to support the group’s strategic direction.

Qualifications/Requirements:

• Able to leverage and apply category management, space planning, shopper marketing, and segmentation principles per department strategy and business objectives.
• Must be a strong, confident, and engaging self-starter with the determination and drive to identify opportunities, prioritize where to play and how to win, and own category performance.
• Capable of working cross functionally and building strong collaborative relationships, providing guidance, and influencing internal and external business partners to align and drive initiatives.
• Strong financial and business acumen to quantify financial impacts on assortment decisions and assess promotional performance. The role will generate product forecasts, monitor margin performance, and articulate category strategy and rationale to the organization.
• Familiar with leveraging and synthesizing CPG industry insights and scan data – Nielsen, IRI/Circana, shopper panel data, Numerator, etc.
• Strong skills in Excel - including pivot tables, pivot charts, use of macros, VLOOKUP’s, with the ability to analyze and manipulate large data sets. Comfortable creating scorecards, visualizing Excel data in presentations, and knowledgeable of core retail KPIs and retail trade math.
• Able to develop convincing actionable insights-led category stories in PowerPoint that motivate internal and external team members to see the big picture and align.
• High-level presentation skills comfortable with leading discussions across the organization with various stakeholders (field to c-suite leadership) and external business partners (suppliers, distributors, CPG companies, bottlers).
• Monitor supplier performance and be comfortable providing candid feedback, negotiating supplier agreements including pricing and delivery, and setting metrics to conduct supplier performance reviews.
• Own the SKU rationalization and life cycle process, segmented category assortment, and planogram strategy communicating category/brand rationale and updates to field sales teams.

Education and Experience:

• 4 years of experience in retail category management. Experience in beverages and convenience industry highly desirable.
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent combinations of experience and education in lieu of degree.
• Experience/knowledge in shopper marketing, space planning, segmentation, and RGM (revenue growth management) highly desirable.
• Strong teamwork and collaboration mindset, positive proactive flexible attitude, and ability to take ownership of responsibilities.
• Strong interpersonal skills, discretion, diplomacy, and judgment.
• Proven ability to interpret significant amounts of data, reports, and analysis, to convert information into actionable strategies to achieve goals.
• Able to navigate through a matrix of cross-functional considerations to guide strategic solutions and translate them into actionable ideas from conception to execution.
• Demonstrate excellent judgment and able to maintain confidentiality.
• Must possess excellent interpersonal skills to apply in communications with supplier partners, internal operations team, and internal corporate departments.
• Must have strong attention to detail and follow-up skills.
• Some travel (day trips and overnight) will be required to trade shows and Five Star business locations.

About Five Star Breaktime Solutions:

• Join one of the nation’s largest on-site food and beverage service providers proudly offering custom solutions to our clients including micro-markets, full-line vending, coffee service, pantry service, sustainable products, water (filtered and bottled) service, catering, and corporate food service.

Notice: Please note this job description is not designed to cover or contain a comprehensive listing of activities, duties or responsibilities that are required of the employee for this job. Duties, responsibilities, and activities may change at any time with or without notice.

EEO/Veteran/Federal Contractor