GAIL's Buying Manager

The Bread Factory is London’s leading Artisan Bakery, known for award-winning breads, pastries, and cakes, supplying top-quality products across e-commerce, grocery, food services, and retailers such as our GAIL’s Bakeries nationwide. As our teams grow, we seek our next GAIL's Buying Manager to join our team.

As the GAIL’s Buying Manager, you will be responsible for the category we call ‘The Pantry’. This is a collection of branded and un-branded third party produced products, including our jams (from Tea Together), butter (from Quicke’s), honey (from Oxfordshire Honey), and drinks such as Momo Kombucha and Rapscallion.

We Care about a Job Well Done:

Since 1993, we have been champions in traditional baking with the finest ingredients and techniques. We always do things the right way, not the easy way.

We Care about Baking:

At The Bread Factory, all our teams take pride in crafting beautiful, freshly baked loaves, pastries, and cakes. We are all passionate about our products and share knowledge among us all.

We Care about Each Other:

We always act with respect, empathy, and support to our employees, neighbours and customers.

We Care about Community:

We believe in minimising unsustainable practices and reducing waste. While ensuring we continue to provide everyone with nutritious high-quality food.

We Care about Nature:

We’re committed to sustainability across our supply chain—from reducing waste and reusing surplus to supporting regenerative farming that helps restore the planet.

Every day is different at The Bread Factory, but here are some of the things you will be doing:

• Drive initiatives to outperform vs budget and remove cost where it doesn’t add value.
• Own the use of merchandising space and work in partnership with Operations & Creative Studio to drive more relevance to customers and stronger commercial performance.
• Own the GAIL’s Craft Community and the supplier partnership strategy. Be the face of GAIL’s to many of our most special relationships.
• Manage the full procurement process including market research, competitive pricing, supplier selection and negotiation, contract implementation and supplier performance review.
• Actively maintain live knowledge of supply markets and develop/ implement buying strategy.
• Pro-actively find interesting new partners based on the creative vision for The Pantry.
• Collaborating with the Creative Studio, NPD and Technical teams you’ll be driving the delivery of new ranges into GAIL’s.
• Understand and participate in the Innovation Stage Gate process, to ensure the on-time delivery of new launches within the seasonal plan.
• At all times you will have a close eye on the competitor and industry landscape.
• Be a true partner to the Creative Studio and Operations teams, so you can deliver the vision in a way which is sympathetic to the realities of operating our bakeries
• Protect the integrity of our GAIL’s Craft Community whilst driving the commercial performance of the ranges. Engage with Finance and Data & Insight to provide fact-based insights on what can change and why.

Our team tells us you will be a great addition if you have:

• Experience ideally at Buying Manager level or equivalent, with a record of delivering strong results. Knowledge of negotiating skills such as GAP approach.
• Experience in creating and delivering strategic plans and budget forecasts.
• Experience nurturing small supplier and partner relationships
• Confident communicator who can engage effectively at all levels.
• Able to live the values each day and is passionate about our mission to change the food system through sustainability, ethical sourcing and making things better each day
• Someone who can make things happen, is highly organised and can support our ambition to be one of the best bakeries in the world.

What’s in it for you:

• Fresh bread daily to take home to enjoy with family and friends.
• 50% discount at GAIL’s and 40% off at The Bread Factory & The Flour Station Markets.
• 25 days holiday + bank holidays
• Discounts and Savings from high-street retailers and restaurants
• 24-hour GP service
• Cycle to work scheme