Category Manager - Dairy

The Role & Key Responsibilities

Job Title: Category Manager - Dairy

Location: Remote, with regular travel across Europe required.

Contract: Permanent

Packages include: Salary from 39747 EUR per year plus a benefits package designed to support your wellbeing and reward your impact.

AB Agri is a global leader in animal feed, nutrition, and agri-food solutions, operating in 84 countries. We are committed to producing food sustainably and responsibly through innovation and efficiency. As a Category Manager, you will manage the full strategy and delivery for key ingredients, including delectated whey powders, WPC, lactose, dairy permeates, and other milk-based ingredients critical to our nutritional product lines You will work within an international team, benefit from professional development opportunities, and be part of a great company that values growth, collaboration, and making a positive impact in the industry.

What you'll be doing:

• Develop and deliver a multi-year dairy category strategy aligned with commercial pricing goals, margin improvement initiatives, and nutrition product development plans.
• Lead annual cost budgeting and category risk planning processes.
• Build and maintain strong senior-level relationships with strategic dairy suppliers, producers, processors, and traders across Europe.
• Coordinate supplier risk assessments, including financial, ESG, and capacity reviews, in collaboration with Quality.
• Act as the primary link between Procurement and Nutrition/R&D to ensure category strategies meet technical formulation and feed performance requirements.
• Support Quality and Regulatory Affairs in maintaining feed safety standards, implementing traceability protocols, and conducting supplier audits.

What you'll bring:

• Extensive experience in category management or strategic sourcing within food, feed, or dairy-related commodities.
• Proven track record in managing the full procurement process, including category management, use of e-sourcing tools, and supplier management/analytics.
• Solid understanding of dairy ingredient markets, such as whey, lactose, and protein derivatives.
• Strong financial and commercial skills, including knowledge of TCO, commodity risk, and hedging principles.
• Fluent in English, with willingness to travel regularly across Europe (20-40%).

About The Company

Rewarding your passion

When you join us, you'll do meaningful work and be rewarded fairly for it.From annual salary reviews and incentive bonus, ongoing career development and enhanced family, financial and wellbeing benefits - these are just some of the ways we reward you - from day one.

About us We are AB Neo a specialist business bringing together the expertise of four successful companies with the aim of revolutionising nutrition for all neonates. Bring your talents to AB Neo and play your part in producing affordable, high quality and responsible food for the growing global population.

We're part of AB Agri, the agricultural division of Associated British Foods (ABF plc) and we're passionate about feeding the world responsibly and affordably by making quality animal feed, creating nutrition and technology-based products, and offering data services for the agri-food industry. What sets us apart is how we delight our customers - and that's because of great people like you. People with different life experiences who share common values. Together we're building a fair, innovative and inclusive culture.

As a Disability Confident employer, we're committed to ensuring our application and recruitment processes work for everyone so if you need any additional support (like alternative formats for your application, bringing a support dog to the offices, a sign language interpreter - or anything else) just let us know.

Application Notes

We hope you feel that AB Agri is somewhere you can thrive and so we'd love to hear from you. We get a lot of applications for our roles and sometimes need to close the process early so register your details and upload your CV via our careers website as soon as you can - it will only take a few minutes.

When you do, we'll ask you some equal opportunities questions just to ensure our recruitment process is inclusive - or show us areas we can improve. This information is anonymised, separate from your application and is never seen by the hiring panel. You can choose not to answer these questions and this won't affect your application.

Apply today or contact our recruitment team for more information.

Agencies and media sales

AB Agri group politely requests no contact from recruitment agencies or media sales. We don't accept speculative CVs from recruitment agencies nor accept the fees associated with them.