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Leading in Our Stores: Lead Food Manager — Sainsbury’s Supermarkets
One of our core values is that our management teams aren’t just store leaders—they’re dynamic forces driving our business growth. With bold vision, empowerment, and a hunger for doing things better, they inspire teams to drive everyday excellence from product availability to safety to seamless customer experiences. The result is a better work environment for colleagues and next-level satisfaction for every customer.
About the Role
You’ll be entrusted with Culture and Performance, leading a small team of food managers to deliver exceptional service across our groceries shop floor in a Sainsbury’s supermarket. This is a hands-on leadership role where you’ll ensure our ethical standards and innovation thrive—sleeves rolled up, accountability taken, and quality uncompromising.
You’ll partner with store leadership to execute high-impact trading events—from peak season surges like Christmas to leisure events like Easter—ensuring we set ourselves apart. Regularly stepping in when necessary, you’ll role model our values, drive operational excellence in the food hall, and set high standards for processes and safety.
Most importantly, you’ll nurture diverse teams to achieve exceptional results by maintaining engagement, supporting growth, and fostering an environment where every colleague feels valued and meaningfully challenged.
Your Responsibilities
- Lead and manage a food team of multiple managers, ensuring they deliver high-performing service aligned to shifting sales goals.
- Execute high-visibility trading events, coordinating with store teams to drive customer resilience and experience to outperform seasonal expectations.
- Take full responsibility for store operations when required, ensuring smooth running of the food hall while absence of senior management is relatively rarely.
- Balance compliance with flexibility—adhere to safety and operational best practices, while driving exceptional customer experiences through flawless service.
- Manage a team of 50+ colleagues with a focus on retention, development and real-time motivational engagement.
- Inspire a team culture built on accountability—whether creating opportunities for valued colleagues to shine or navigating complex People matters sensitively.
Who We’re Looking For
We’re looking for the type of leadership who will grow not just alongside Sainsbury’s mission, but catalyse our customers to see us as more than a supermarket—neighbours, and partners in their daily lives.
To thrive, you’ll need:
- A passionate ambition for driving all aspects of customer-focused business—reaching the incremental edge every day for our people and their needs.
- Experience managing business leaders, not just frontline teams, in a fast-paced, customer-driven environment where innovation shapes output.
- Operational fortitude when left to own performance gaps—capable of confidently stepping into any role challenge.
- A data-driven mindset to interpret KPIs and apply results to refine team and store execution.
- Commitment to inclusivity across all levels, championing psychological and cultural practices that lift team and organisational performance.
- Confident and decisive problem-solving in areas that typically require a steely demeanour—absences, performance coaching or disciplinary actions.
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Essential Experience & Criteria
We want someone whose track record speaks for itself—who’s built things bigger in impact, scaled performance at leadership levels, and delivered results through emissions. You should have:
✦ Highly-tenured leadership in large teams alongside broad operational ownership, including but not limited to management of performing teams, driving culture of ownership with quantifiable success. ✦ A proven record of setting and meeting exceptional customer experience standards—whether it is ensuring optimal availability of stocks, seamless signposting environments or superior ‘runway’ completions with colleagues. ✦ Data-driven leadership experience. You understand operational KPIs be they sales, stock records, customer feedback or colleague metrics—able to elevate effects above metrics and drive lasting action through them. ✦ Experience in HR operations— Solving complex People matters with empathy, integrity and resilience in all contexts from absence issues to disciplinary & collective employee catalogue needs. ✦ Clear leadership credentials within operational spaces (Retail, F&B or fast-paced customer sector) demonstrating unfettered confidence when leading decisions/lessons in absence of higher up responsibility. ✦ A track history of driving change forward with buy-in: adopting new work practices, scaling fine-tuned systems or shifting people perspectives with equally meaningful impact.
Rewarding Benefits
We believe the unique characteristics of our work culture are what sustain a meaningful career—and we back that up financially and socially.
All Lead Food Managers are competitively compensation bands, along with the following benefits inclusive of completion/status:
- Discount card: 10% off shopping across Sainsbury’s, Argos, Tu and Habitat each time a store member qualifies. Followed by a 15% off Sainsbury’s specifically every Friday and Saturday.
- Annual bonus based on collective and board-wide numerical targets fulfilled.
- Free food + refreshments. Our stores always provide generous access to food and hot drinks.
- Holiday entitlement: Compensated annual leave with four weeks baseline provision; supplemented with maternity/paternity schemes paid at outset.
- Pension matching: We align with the force of our endeavour by contributing 4-7.5% of pension contributions.
- Customised share options through the exclusive Sainsbury’s share scheme: discounted rates for shares to help develop investment propositions.
- Holistic Wellbeing Support: Access tailored benefits including counselling, legal and financial/employment advice, removing barriers for our well+. Support is available as discretionary, private and confidential.
- Flexible Cycle-to-Work partnership scheme, allowing technicians engineers Colleague-used opportunities for professional development (reduced NI and tax on equipment).
- Resource discounts: Links to cheaper-than-market gym memberships, dining deals, family holidays, charity work vouchers, and more—exclusive to enrolled employees.
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Inclusion: Where We Are Today
We’re on a mission to ensure that every employee can uniquely progress through our full talent ecosystem—regardless of identity or circumstance.
Inclusion at Sainsbury's is an ongoing journey. Here’s what we’re doing to foster a genuinely inclusive environment:
- Dynamic Colleague Networks across diverse lenses to amplify voices, opportunities, and wider talent insights.
- Career progression support through mentorship, ongoing training and extensive mentorship collaborations.
- Flexible working options for caregiving duties (Guardianship to relatives) within €10K on our discretionary earning floor or by set percentage available to retirees to relinquish standard shift-dependent roles.
- Diversity Manners: Proactive sessions and awareness training continuously placed to strengthen our institutional influence across sourced suppliers, data accountability, and communication accessibility.
- In celebration of diversity, within our public-facing operations we champion all beliefs/channel via non-judgemental engagement.
We commit to weave inclusivity into the foundation of all operative practices—hopefully making them contextually indispensable for employees and customers alike.
For more about Sainsbury’s strides in creating an environment for all, read about [our Inclusion programmes here](link placeholder).
For applicants or interviewing stages requiring supportive adjustments to ensure accessibility or procedural adjustments to your needs are met, please communicate your requirements as soon as possible, and we will make every effort to assist.
We don’t just have a business—we have a legacy of everyday heroics, smart service, and uncompromised belief in what drives people focused experiences. Join this team, where hleadying is storytelling.
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