Category Manager

Who are we?

When you think of food delivery in the MENA region, we’d be pretty surprised if talabat didn’t pop into your mind first! Since delivering our first order in Kuwait in 2004, we’ve grown quite a lot over the past 17 years.

Today, we deliver hundreds of millions of food orders, grocery items and other products per year, to our customers in nine countries throughout the region with more than 3,000+ employees! Our food delivery business works with over 27,000 brands and almost 50,000 branches, while our q-commerce concept, talabat mart, now delivers groceries to customers in Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman Qatar, and the UAE in 30 minutes or less!

Our philosophy is to make sure we do what is right for our ecosystem - our customers, our partners, our people, our riders, and the communities in which we operate. Our #techforgood program allows our customers a safe and convenient way to contribute to important causes in their community through donating to local and international charities directly on talabat with a focus on food insecurity in the region. Since its inception in 2020, we have facilitated the donation of well over 1 million meals to those in need, as well as donated over $1.5 million to charity with the help of our partners and customers. talabat is part of Delivery Hero, the global leader in online food delivery and q-commerce.

As Talabat continues to grow and keep ahead of the curve we have launched our very own end-end grocery service across the MENA region: tMart

Role Summary

We’re looking for a Category Manager to join the team and focus on growing our own Grocery Store “tMart”, which is the region’s first cloud store concept offering 30-minutedelivery of groceries at hypermarket prices. The service has expanded rapidly across Kuwait, UAE, Qatar, Jordan, Bahrain, Egypt, Oman and Iraq!

What’s On Your Plate?

• Full Ownership over the category management role in terms of Assortments, Pricing, Offers and Supply. 
• Responsible for monitoring economic performance of the assigned departments /categories across sales, gross margin, profit and loss and consistency with the company's commercial strategy. 
• Ensuring proper implementation of the commercial strategy and strategic guidelines, including categories plan and pricing strategy. 
• Providing input to the Ops team flows, adjacencies, tools and templates, fixtures, etc.
• Reviewing and resolving any issues with local suppliers. 

Assortment: 

• Ensuring cost efficiency across our consumers that meets their needs/wants. 
• Defining and maintaining the local assortment and integrating the basic assortment for the department/categories. 
• Providing regional teams with information regarding products and quantities needed for international and regional contracts. 
• Selecting local suppliers, negotiating and purchasing in line with expected needs guided by standards such as cost price, discounts, rebates, payment terms, discounts, etc. 

Price: 

• Pricing the items based on pricing guidelines and recommended prices for PL/Imported items. 
• Collecting market prices and conducting country price audits. 

Promos: 

• Identifying local promo products and pricing each item and submitting forecasting/relevant reordering information to replenishment. 
• Developing the country promotion calendar. 
• Following up and ensuring effective execution of all activities required for each promotional event. 
• Analysing and providing inputs for more effective promotional activities such as consumer preferences, local competitors and trends. 

What Did We Order?

• You have at least 5+ years of experience in progressive development and management of multiple product categories, matured by working for large retailers (FMCG), in an international setting.
• You have built teams and led cross-functional projects at scale.
• You are very detail-oriented, structured and know how to prioritize -- you consider yourself as someone who delivers solutions and not bottlenecks to be solved.
• You are willing to do anything necessary for the project to succeed, including working on the warehouse floor when you are short staffed to make a customer delivery, or to take customer calls. No job is too insignificant, no detail is too small for you.
• You are able to interact with senior-level executives and can manage the expectations of multiple stakeholders. You are someone energized by the unknown and look forward to learning each day on the job. You have excellent analytical and communication skills, and always like to be hands-on with several tools.
• You have excellent analytical and communication skills, and always like to be hands-on with several tools.
• Additionally, you have robust interpersonal and intercultural skills. You can inspire several teams and stakeholders to rally behind a mission..