Within my role as Category Buyer, I’m responsible for delivering against very stretching sales and profitability budgets and there are obviously a wide range of factors that influence the delivery of those and identifying and delivering own-label new product development opportunities is clearly an important part of that. Specifically, with regards to the Fairtrade Smoothie launch, I would work very closely with Allison, the Category Product Manager, initially just to assess the market. Once we’ve identified that opportunity, I would work closely with our supply base to deliver and develop suitable recipes, that are not only commercially viable but offer customers a great tasting product and my specific commercial responsibilities would lie with setting retail prices, developing promotional strategy for these products.

It is important to us to ethically source products, to source clean ‘dec’ products for ingredient declarations and to trade fairly and justly with our farmer and supply base. That said, it’s also important to deliver profitable products and make this business a profitable one so we can invest in to the future on stores, on systems and on people. So whilst we trade fairly and justly with suppliers, negotiations are hard and I think that’s partly because of the challenges that we set ourselves.

If we think about the launch of the own-labelled Smoothie range, I would work very closely with our category marketing resource as well as our colleagues in quality and consumer care from a technical point of view. The suppliers are obviously very important to us. We also work very closely with Supply Chain colleagues to get these products launched and in to store.

Job satisfaction comes from the level of empowerment, which this business gives me as a Category Buyer. I’m directly responsible for making decisions on a day-to-day basis that impact directly and immediately on the bottom line. And whilst that presents challenges, stresses, hard work; a great deal of satisfaction comes from being able to take on that responsibility, be accountable for the budget and achieve it.