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Category Development Director / Sr. Manager

Pilgrim’s is seeking a strategic, business‑minded, and highly cross‑functional Director/ Sr Manager of Category Development to lead process, operating model and discipline behind how the company identifies, evaluates, and develops market opportunities that drive growth and margin expansion.

This team partners with cross‑functional leaders (Category Management, Marketing, R&D, Revenue Management, Sales, Channel Teams, etc.) to orchestrate commercial alignment and ensure the organization operates with a shared market vision. More specifically, the team defines the ambition, establishes market structure and scope, identifies priority growth spaces, and manages the proactive development of a disciplined pipeline of strategic and tactical opportunities—positioning our JBS Prepared Foods business to win across multiple verticals.

The Director leads the long‑term Category/Business/Channel Strategy process and the short‑term business development engine, while ensuring functional owners—Business Leaders, Category Managers, RGM, Brand, R&D, and Channel Owners—retain full decision rights. This role owns the process, frameworks, cadence, and integration that align the enterprise.

Successful Candidate:

• Embodies and actively demonstrates our company values.
• Takes initiative, is disciplined, self‑directed, and motivated to uncover and develop market opportunities while driving impactful cross‑functional initiatives in a matrix structure.
• Excels at leading without authority—influencing through insight, frameworks, and clarity rather than mandates; acts as the integrator and facilitator of commercial inputs, ensuring coherence across channels and verticals.
• Is highly organized and capable of managing multiple projects, routines, and incoming requests with consistency and follow‑through.
• Builds processes, frameworks, and logic that enable better, faster, more aligned decision‑making.
• Develops strong, trust‑based relationships with R&D, Brand, Category, Sales, and Channel leaders; effectively navigates multiple and sometimes conflicting agendas to align teams on the most impactful opportunities.
• Communicates clearly and confidently; comfortable presenting insights and recommendations to customers and executive leadership.
• Understands business dynamics quickly, connects daily work to enterprise objectives, and effectively supports both strategic and tactical initiatives.
• Possesses strong analytical capability; translates market information into insights and insights into strategy to support fact‑based, economically sound decision‑making.
• Maintains an external orientation—builds networks, tracks market movements, and brings urgency and rigor to updating our market view.
• Operates with a growth and research mindset—tests assumptions, deepens understanding of market fundamentals, develops new tools, and continuously improves ways of working.

Role & Responsibilities:

LONG‑TERM / STRATEGIC LEADERSHIP

The team owns processes, frameworks & strategic discipline. It partners with functional decision-makers to outline business ambitions, shape insight led initiatives, proactively orchestrate their deployment, while guaranteeing organization readiness to win in the priority market segments.

1. Business / Category / Channel Strategy Leadership

• Lead the business strategy process that defines the ambition, the market model, where to play, and how to win.
• Ensure shared understanding of category roles, competitive position, and growth horizons.
• Work with cross functionals to define the plan and roadmaps.

2. Brand & Marketing Strategy

• Partner with Brand and Marketing teams to develop the consumer, customer and brand objectives.
• Own the process and strategic discipline for defining the branded portfolio, consumer target, positioning, and 4Ps strategy.
• Ensure all brand choices ladder up to category strategy and market opportunity.

3. Innovation Platforms & Insight Development

• Lead development of long-term innovation platforms grounded in consumer, operator, and customer insights.
• Connect category and channel opportunities to R&D and Product Development pipelines.
• Provide structured, insight-driven opportunity definitions for stage-gate with clear prioritization.

4. Commercial Capability Roadmap

• Own the commercial capability model: tools, systems, processes, dashboards, and decision frameworks.
• Build organizational category fluency and commercial discipline across the matrix.
• Standardize how insights, strategy, and action flow across the enterprise.

5. Go-to-Market Strategy Process

• Create GTM strategy frameworks across Retail, Foodservice, QSR, and emerging verticals.
• Partner with Channel Owners and Sales to ensure differentiated, insight-led approaches.
• Build cross functional GTM plans and aligned around the company goals.
• Drive cross-functional alignment on the logic behind channel choices and customer positioning.

SHORT‑TERM - BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT:

With an insight led approach, it integrates Brand, Product, Sales roadmaps, align priorities and activity to drive specific GTM priority initiatives. 

1. Brand - Consumer / Customer development

• Bring clear, actionable consumer/operator insights to inform brand, category, and customer decisions.
• Clarify the short-term commercial implications of market shifts and address plans and action steps to refine and develop market position.

2. Product & Portfolio Activation

• Use category logic to guide product and portfolio decisions (assortment, SKU roles, pack strategy).
• Partner with Supply Chain, R&D, and Category leads making sure item-level decisions are made and executed.
• Ensure decisions aligns our goals with market logic, seeking significant economic impact.

3. Channel Strategy Activation

• Develop with the teams channel playbooks focused on category dynamics, customer needs, and drivers.
• Provide clarity across channels (Retail, Foodservice, etc) on market dynamics, competitive activity, trends and immediate opportunities.

4. Customer Development & Commercial Storytelling

• Develop customer-facing category narratives, opportunity frameworks, and JBP inputs.
• Enhance customer credibility by integrating insights and cross-functional expertise.
• Equip Sales with consistent, enterprise-backed category stories.

SHORT-TERM – PERFORMANCE & MARKET INTERVENTION

Mobilizing cross-functional alignment; supporting P&L owners

• Diagnose market, category, and customer performance gaps, with clear routines and processes to drive action and disciplined execution.
• Convene RGM, Sales, Category, Marketing, and Ops to align on actions.
• Bring clarity to short-term levers: mix, price, pack, assortment, promo, GTM adjustments.

Ensure performance actions reflect into shared goals and objectives.

Qualifications: 

• Bachelor’s degree required; MBA preferred.
• 7+ years in category development, insights, RGM, brand/marketing, or commercial strategy.
• Strong track record of cross-functional leadership in a matrix environment.
• Exceptional strategic thinking, communication, and storytelling capability.
• Proficiency with syndicated data and insight platforms.
• Strong business acumen; experience in multi-channel food industries preferred.
• Can perform the functions of the job with or without a reasonable accommodation
• As a salaried position with the company, you may be required to travel at some point to other facilities, to attend Company events, or as a representative of the Company in other situations. Unless otherwise specified in this posting, the amount of travel may vary and the most qualified candidate must be willing and able to travel as business needs dictate.

The applicant who fills this position will be eligible for the following compensation and benefits:

• Benefits: Vision, Medical, and Dental coverage begin after 60 days of employment;