Job Description

Job Introduction
At Hotel Chocolat, we pride ourselves on delivering beautiful, innovative packaging that delights our customers, reflects the premium quality of our brand, and supports our commitment to sustainability. We are looking for a Category Buyer to join our Procurement Team, supporting the Packaging Sourcing Manager in driving both the operational and strategic elements of our packaging agenda.
In this role, you will own the packaging supply base and associated spend - taking a leading role in delivering our procurement packaging strategy, optimising growth, hitting environmental / social targets, ensuring best value and quality, whilst mitigating supply failure and driving continuous improvement.
Working at the heart of our new product development and innovations pipelines, you will help to source and deliver the packaging solutions that bring our products to life. From engaging suppliers, to managing critical timelines and ensuring our packaging meets the highest standards of sustainability, quality, cost efficiency and overall value. Alongside this exciting innovation work, you'll will take ownership of the essential administration that underpins our sourcing activities, navigating our current systems, and identifying opportunities to simplify and add value.
As well as a competitive salary and a range of company benefits including private healthcare cover, enhanced maternity and paternity leave and Company pension contributions, you'll receive 50% discount on all products, and a 70% discount for you and your guests when you stay at our Rabot Estate hideaway on the paradise island of Saint Lucia.
Here at Hotel Chocolat, we've adopted hybrid working This means you'll join us on site for three days a week, and for the other two days - you can work from wherever you like! The main on-site location for this role will be our Distribution Centre 'Alpha', in St. Neots, Cambridgeshire, with occasional travel as needed to our Chocolate Factory 'Hadley Park' in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, and Distribution Centre 'Beta' in Harpole, Northampton.
Please note that due to the upcoming holiday period, interviews will be commencing from Monday 12th January 2026.
What you'll be doing....

• Manage a diverse range of direct packaging product categories with up to 10m spend across multiple suppliers, to deliver strategies and results that mitigate risk, optimise value, and develop great suppliers selected for sustainable scalable solutions
• Coordinate and effectively influence multiple stakeholder groups, from our operational teams to senior management, ensuring alignment and smooth delivery of projects and key initiatives.
• Work with our development teams, to source and develop new and existing suppliers for both NPD and continuous improvement projects, with an emphasis on evolving our portfolio to be even more environmentally and socially responsible.
• Identifying and ensuring best value throughout NPD, EPD and our ordering cycles.
• Manage competitive bidding process, tendering and contract management via our sourcing platform. Analyse data to present strategic sourcing routes that align to business strategies.
• Responsible for the management and continuity of packaging raw material forward orders, in collaboration with Suppliers and Supply Planning.
• Manage and raise ad hoc purchase orders relating to packaging such as tooling and originations.
• Create, maintain and update project and procurement trackers on a regular basis.
• Own supplier KPIs from a procurement lens and initiate supplier development plans where appropriate.
• Own development and delivery of value and savings pipeline for the packaging categories.
• Understand the external market environment, gather market intelligence, benchmark against the external world and understand price drivers to influence requirements and specifications internally and externally. Gather and utilise market intelligence to inform price forecasting database.
• Deploy our SRM framework to maximise supplier capabilities to drive performance, originality of innovation and ethics. Conduct regular supplier reviews.
• Own category regular reporting, to measure performance against budgets and forecasts.
• Analyse, recommend and implement solutions for special projects that enable agility within the Procurement Team to respond to business needs and drive structural improvements.
• As we grow, our data and systems are growing with us but are not where we want them just yet (but there is a plan!). In the meantime, owning your category data, price queries, and supplier set up will be key. As well as your ability to identify and implement (automated) process improvements to drive efficiency.

Who you are...
Essential

• Excellent communication skills to effectively engage stakeholders across all levels both internally and externally.
• Attention to detail - able to own and manage procurement data and systems efficiently and effectively.
• Procurement or Supply Chain experience.

Desirable

• Experience within a packaging or similar category.
• Professional qualification.
• FMCG industry experience.
• Sourcing category experience.
• Sourcing strategy development.

Who are we?
We're one of the UK's favourite premium chocolate brands, with a range of products spanning luxury gifts, alcohol and our pioneering drinking chocolate system, the Velvetiser(TM).
A cacao pod takes years to grow - it can't be rushed if it's going to be just right for our products. The same can be said for Hotel Chocolat, which originally started as a mint production company before we realised it was luxury chocolate that we were really passionate about.
Now, we're market leaders in the industry. What began as an online-only business grew to over 140 stores across the UK, and we're still growing... Today, we're multi-category, multi-channel, and multi-territory, and our customers, colleagues, cacao farmers and suppliers all benefit from the success we make together.
To learn more about us and read about our People Pledge - our commitment to equality, diversity and inclusion - click here:

Skills Required