Senior Director and Head of Foodservice, Arla Denmark

Location: Viby J, DK

In this key role for Arla in the Danish market, you have a unique opportunity to impact the development of our Foodservice business. This is a challenging role, where you use your end-to-end commercial understanding to define new innovative ways on how to drive growth in the Danish market. The position reports to the Managing Director of Arla Denmark and is based in Aarhus. Due to leadership of 30 colleagues, the role will require your physical presence in Aarhus minimum 3-4 days/week.

How you will make an impact

As the Head of Foodservice in the Danish market, you will work closely together with your team of 30 people to bring foodservice to the next ambitious level. As P&L responsible, you will develop and shape the foodservice agenda to reach the ambitious targets in our strategy Future26. Furthermore, through your customer centric mindset, you will set the right strategy for the business unit that captures the opportunities in Danish foodservice trade and the needs of our customers.

Leading the foodservice function in Denmark, you will:

1. Build a clear local strategy and yearly plans reflecting both local and global direction and priorities areas, while participating actively in both global and local strategy and yearly plan processes.
2. Identify growth opportunities in Channels and Customers – driving brand share growth.
3. Lead local foodservice portfolio development through innovations and market roll out from other markets.
4. Conduct on-going profitability optimization via portfolio- and channel mix and net revenue management.
5. Negotiate year-end agreements and contracts with key wholesalers, key end-user customers and public tenders.
6. Build strong joint business plans for growth with key customers.
7. Develop and drive top-to-top relations with key customers.
8. Have external engagements in relevant advisory boards and communities.

As part of the Danish Leadership Team, you will be managing the performance and driving growth for Arla in the Danish foodservice market. You will also work closely together with skilled foodservice colleagues from other markets, and you will be part of the Global Foodservice Leadership Team.

What will make you successful

As a strong sales profile, you have worked across big customers in FMCG. You have a profound track record building customer relations and an excellent flair for detecting and developing business opportunities gained from sales or several commercial roles. You have successfully taken innovations from ideas to execution in the market, and you are familiar with managing and optimizing sizable budgets. You master all traits from strategizing to execution, and you are energized by both working with the long-term perspective and delivering short-term execution. In addition, your CV reflects several years of leadership experience during which you have successfully captained high-performing teams of colleagues and led through leaders. You thrive in a matrix organization with a complex stakeholder landscape and have ideally worked in both local and global roles. As the foodservice industry is very dynamic, you thrive in delivering results on the short term while responding to the long term dynamics to secure we are also winning in the future.

To facilitate this, you:

1. Have a commercial or marketing master degree and a broad and intense experience within FMCG with focus on sales.
2. Have ideally experience from both retail and foodservice channels and are on the forefront of the dynamic development in the foodservice industry, including the rapid digitalization taking place.
3. Have experience in managing big customer accounts, working through wholesalers and managed field sales organizations.
4. Have financial acumen and used to driving the P&L.
5. Have significant experience from leading leaders or leading a function, and your leadership style is closely aligned with Arla's leadership values; Lead, Sense, Create.
6. Are results driven and able to formulate and follow through on the strategy all the way to execution in close cooperation with colleagues and customers.
7. Have a structured and analytical mindset, enabling you to maintain a strategic view on foodservice and sales.
8. Speak and write English and Danish.

For the right candidate, this is a great opportunity to work with the key customers in foodservice in the Danish market as part of a great team of colleagues and with the opportunity to develop further within Arla Foods, both in Denmark and across other geographies.

Application and contact
If you want to seize this exciting opportunity, please apply as soon as possible. We will call for interviews on an ongoing basis. For additional information on the position, please contact Managing Director in Arla Denmark, Henrik Lilballe Hansen (+45 91312650) or Head of HR, Christian Flø (+45 21288412). If you have other questions, please reach out to Talent Acquisition Consultant, Maria Mathiasen, at +45 41950883.

We have a purpose for Good
At Arla, we strive to unlock the highest potential in each other while working together to create a sustainable future of dairy. We call it Stronger People Stronger Planet and it is deeply anchored in our organisation and founded on our commitment to respecting human rights, increasing access to healthy dairy nutrition, inspiring good food habits, and improving the environment for future generations. In order to succeed we need to hire people with a sustainable mindset. Could this be you?