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Category Manager, Customer Communication
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Position Title: Category Manager, Customer Communication
Position Type: Regular - Full-Time
Grade: Grade 05
Requisition ID: 40338
Category Manager – Customer Communication
About McCain
At McCain, we’re feeding the world: from French fries to Smiles, we contribute to the important role food plays in people's lives. That’s why we’re dedicated to ensuring our core values—Family, Authentic, Trusted, and Quality—shine through every day. As a privately owned family company with over 60 years of experience, a presence in more than 160 countries, and a global team of 22,000 people, our values and culture are at the heart of everything we do. We believe that we can work together, along with our business and community partners, to bring sustainable growth and positive change today, tomorrow, and for generations to come. Join us and see how you can MAKE IT at McCain!
Why join the McCain family
- Your Life – we’re here to help you fulfil your potential, flourish, and thrive in work and life.
- Your Success – work alongside passionate individuals who are committed to supporting your career ambitions, drive, and success.
- Your Impact – we want you to make a meaningful, lasting impact for you, for your colleagues, and for the business.
About the role
In every role, McCainers are ambitious, curious, and interested in helping each other create good work experiences. We think about the customer and make doing business with McCain easy.
Reporting to the Senior Category Manager – Category Strategy, this is a high-impact, execution-focused role at the heart of the Category Growth team. As Category Manager – Customer Communications, you will bring McCain’s Customer Value Proposition to life across retail, QSR and foodservice channels—helping to drive brand preference and deliver sustainable customer and business growth.
You’ll own the delivery of insight-led, omni-channel customer communications, shaping how McCain shows up with customers at every touchpoint. From leading customer sell-ins and coordinating trade engagement events, to providing sharp commercial analysis that informs planning and decision-making, your work will directly influence commercial outcomes.
Partnering closely with channel and environment specialists, and a broad range of cross-functional teams, you’ll ensure communications are relevant, compelling and tailored to customer needs—while remaining agile to changing market dynamics. You’ll also play a key role in equipping the GB leadership team with customer insight that supports effective business planning and strategic direction.
Leadership Principles
Our principles, each with related practices, guide our actions across the organisation. Together, they address how McCain interacts with our customers and employees, and how we work as individuals and collectively to find success. While each role adheres to the Leadership Principles, individual roles may focus more on a specific principle or principles.
- We are customer obsessed. Customers are our starting point. By understanding their needs and leveraging data and consumer insights, we drive mutual success.
- We think big and plan ahead. Through ambition, curiosity, and smart risks, we can accomplish goals, refine processes, and innovate to scale success.
- We bring out the best in our people. We create safe spaces for our people so that trust and empowerment come naturally. Inclusion is about listening first, showing humility, and working together.
- We act like owners. Together, we clear obstacles and do the work that makes us all successful and proud to be part of McCain.
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Accountabilities
Execute Category Strategy Initiatives
- Bring category strategy to life by partnering with environment and channel specialists to develop initiatives that work across multiple channels and customer types.
- Proactively collaborate with Commercial Operations, Sales, Marketing, Innovation and international teams to ensure strong alignment and flawless execution.
Lead Omni-Channel Customer Communications
- Develop and deliver best-in-class omni-channel communication plans using the 3Cs framework, ensuring consistent, tailored messaging across all customer touchpoints.
- Create high-impact selling tools, presentation materials and communication assets that enable commercial teams and resonate with customer partners.
- Continually evolve how McCain communicates with customers, leveraging digital tools, data-led storytelling and new communication formats.
Own Customer Sell-In Excellence
- Play a hands-on role in customer sell-ins, leading category and marketing input to deliver compelling, insight-rich presentations across Retail, QSR and Foodservice.
- Influence customer stakeholders through structured, data-driven narratives that clearly articulate the value of McCain’s Big Bet initiatives.
Deliver Category Insight for Commercial Planning
- Provide rigorous, timely analysis of category, consumer and shopper data to support commercial planning and decision-making.
- Develop, maintain and enhance omni-channel market tracking to support senior commercial leaders with clear, relevant insight.
- Utilise key data sources—including Kantar, Circana and dunnhumby (Retail); Lumina Intelligence and Circana CREST (Foodservice); alongside PowerBI, SAP BI and other tools—to deliver impactful reporting and recommendations.
Track Performance Against Commercial Plans
- Apply market and customer insight to monitor performance versus agreed commercial KPIs.
- Build and maintain performance dashboards that translate data into clear, concise and actionable updates for senior stakeholders.
Apply Advanced Data & Analytical Capability
- Demonstrate strong analytical expertise across retail and foodservice data sources, market research, loyalty data, shopper panels and operator insights.
- Translate complex data into practical, value-driven recommendations that support commercial action.
- Bring curiosity and pace to the role by exploring and adopting emerging technologies—such as AI-enabled tools—to improve efficiency, accuracy and insight quality.
Qualifications
- 3–5 years’ experience in Category Management, Commercial Support, Insight or Data Analytics within FMCG/CPG, retail or foodservice environments.
- Hands-on experience with syndicated and customer data, including tools such as Kantar, Circana, dunnhumby (retail) and Lumina Intelligence or Circana CREST (foodservice).
- A strong analytical mindset, with a proven ability to turn complex data into clear, actionable recommendations that drive commercial decisions.
- Compelling communication and presentation skills, with experience creating and delivering high-quality, customer-facing selling stories.
- Highly organised and detail-focused, comfortable managing multiple initiatives simultaneously in a fast-paced, matrixed organisation.
- A collaborative and influential approach, with the confidence to engage and align a wide range of internal and external stakeholders.
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Location
Being in the office every single day is a thing of the past. Here at McCain, we champion hybrid working. This means we don’t have a set expectation of exactly when you need to be in the office – however we do encourage our full-time, office-based people to connect in person with others for around half of their working time as that’s the best way for us to build and maintain our connections. Our head office (Customer Experience Centre) is on the outskirts of Scarborough – 1.5 hours away from Leeds City Centre, and about an hour from York. We have lots of colleagues who travel to and from our Experience Centre (even if it is just for a good coffee!) and because hybrid really does mean hybrid at McCain, they get the opportunity to collaborate with their colleagues when they’re in the office, and balance that with working from home to ensure they get a good life-work balance.
The benefits of working for McCain
Although we do encourage you to taste the goods you’ll be pleased to know we don’t pay you in ‘chips’. For working hard, you’ll also get a great salary and some pretty good benefits including:
- A generous Car Allowance
- An achievable yearly bonus based on personal performance.
- An excellent pension where we will pay double what you do, up to a maximum of 12% of your pay
- Flexible holidays – where you can buy & sell up to 5 days holiday per year
- Optional health cash plan
- Cycle to work scheme
- ‘Chips In’ Volunteering Day Off - to make a positive impact to the competitiveness, resilience, and long-term development of McCain communities across the globe
And of course, being part of a Global business there are great opportunities to shine/thrive should you wish to relocate in the future. We have an ambitious 5-year growth plan that presents development & progression opportunities for those who seek it out.
The McCain experience
We are McCain: this statement is about our power collectively and our importance individually—your impact is a significant part of the business. Our winning culture focuses on authenticity and trust so we can always bring out the best in our people. Here, you have the opportunity to learn, grow, and thrive while being yourself. Join our team to see why we’re better together.
#LI-OW1
McCain Foods is an equal opportunity employer. As a global family-owned company, we strive to be the employer of choice in the diverse communities around the world in which we live and work. We recognize that inclusion drives our creativity, resilience, and success and makes our business stronger. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, religion, color, national origin, sex, age, veteran status, disability, or any other protected characteristic under applicable law.
McCain is an accessible employer. If you require an accommodation throughout the recruitment process (including alternate formats of materials or accessible meeting rooms), please let us know and we will work with you to find appropriate solutions.
Your privacy is important to us. By submitting personal data or information to us, you agree this will be handled in accordance with McCain’s Global Privacy Policy and Global Employee Privacy Policy, as
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