Merchant I

Overview:

The Merchant I, is responsible for driving profitable sales growth and building a compelling customer proposition across the fresh produce category. This role owns the end-to-end category strategy—from farm and supplier sourcing through supply chain execution, pricing, merchandising, and in-season management—with the goal of delivering the right product, at the right quality, cost, price, and time.

The Merchant I serves as the merchant and category owner, developing strong relationships with growers, shippers, and suppliers to secure high-quality, competitively priced products, while ensuring reliable supply and operational execution. The role combines deep market knowledge with commercial and analytical capabilities to anticipate customer needs, identify opportunities, manage seasonality, and make informed decisions that grow the customer basket and drive sales.

Success in this role requires balancing quality, availability, cost, price, and customer value. The Merchant I continuously evaluates market conditions, crop cycles, supplier performance, competitive pricing, inventory, shrink, and customer demand to optimize the category and maximize both sales and profitability.

Key Responsibilities:

• Category Strategy & Growth: Develop and execute category strategies that increase customer engagement, basket size, sales, and profitability across fresh produce.
• Sourcing & Supplier Management: Identify and source from the right farms, growers, shippers, and suppliers based on quality, cost, reliability, growing region, seasonality, and supply availability.
• Supply Chain Execution: Manage the flow of product from source to customer, ensuring appropriate inventory, freshness, availability, quality, and timely delivery while minimizing waste and shrink.
• Cost & Margin Management: Negotiate competitive costs and manage the relationship between product cost, retail pricing, margin, promotional activity, and market competitiveness.
• Pricing & Competitive Positioning: Establish pricing strategies that deliver strong customer value and remain competitive with the broader market while supporting category financial objectives.
• Merchandising: Develop compelling assortments, promotions, displays, and seasonal programs that make the category easy to shop for and encourage customers to purchase more.
• Quality Management: Establish and maintain clear quality standards, monitor supplier performance, and proactively address quality or freshness issues.
• Market & Consumer Insights: Monitor commodity markets, crop conditions, seasonality, competitor pricing, customer trends, and emerging products to identify opportunities and risks.
• In-Season Management: Continuously adjust sourcing, assortment, pricing, promotions, and inventory based on changes in supply, demand, weather, market conditions, and product performance.
• Cross-Functional Execution: Partner closely with operations, supply chain, replenishment, quality, marketing, finance, and merchandising teams to ensure category plans translate into strong execution.
• Performance Management: Track sales, margin, volume, shrink, inventory, availability, quality, and supplier performance, using data to identify opportunities and drive continuous improvement.
• Digital Shelf Accuracy & Item Integrity: Conduct regular audits of digital content for assigned items, ensuring correct attributes, correct images, correct naming conventions, correct descriptions, and alignment to merchandising standards.

Requirements:

• Bachelor’s degree in business, Supply Chain, Marketing, Agriculture, Food Science, or a related field preferred.
• 1-2 years of experience in category management, merchandising, buying, procurement, sourcing, or supply chain, preferably within fresh produce, grocery, food retail, or a related industry.
• Strong understanding of fresh produce commodities, seasonality, growing regions, crop cycles, quality standards, and supply dynamics.
• Demonstrated experience sourcing and negotiating with growers, farms, shippers, distributors, and other suppliers.
• Proven ability to develop and execute category strategies that drive sales, margin, customer penetration, and basket growth.
• Experience managing cost, retail pricing, margin, promotions, assortment, and competitive market positioning.
• Strong understanding of fresh supply chain execution, including procurement, forecasting, inventory, replenishment, transportation, quality, freshness, and shrink.
• Strong analytical and financial skills, with the ability to interpret sales, margin, volume, inventory, pricing, shrink, and supplier-performance data.
• Experience using data and market intelligence to make in-season merchandising and sourcing decisions.
• Strong negotiation and supplier relationship management skills.
• Demonstrated ability to balance quality, availability, cost, price, margin, and customer value.
• Strong merchandising instincts with an understanding of how assortment, presentation, promotions, and pricing influence customer purchasing behavior.
• Ability to work effectively in a fast-paced, highly seasonal environment where market conditions, supply, weather, and pricing can change quickly.
• Strong communication and cross-functional collaboration skills, with the ability to influence teams across supply chain, operations, finance, marketing, quality, and merchandising.
• High level of ownership, commercial judgment, and decision-making ability.
• Proficiency in Microsoft Excel and experience with merchandising, ERP, procurement, or business intelligence systems preferred.
• Ability and willingness to travel to farms, suppliers, distribution facilities, and industry events as needed.

What Success Looks Like:

· Are we sourcing the right products from the right farms?

· Are we getting the right quality?

· Are we getting the right cost?

· Are we pricing the customer competitively on the market?

· Are we merchandising the category in a way that grows the basket?

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