Assortment Optimization Lead

Farmer's Fridge Careers•Chicago, IL

1d•$110,000 - $120,000

About The Position

Farmer’s Fridge is seeking an analytical, commercially minded, execution-focused Assortment Optimization Lead for its Channel Strategy team. The role translates menu strategy into location-level assortment and merchandising decisions across more than 2,000 smart fridges and supports assortment strategy at retail locations. The position owns how menu strategy is applied in each fridge and retail account, making decisions within established guardrails and recommending when those guardrails should change. The role focuses on optimizing net product margin per slot while accounting for sales, waste, and the fresh nature of the products. It runs and improves models that determine which products go in each slot, projects the impact of assortment changes, and measures actual outcomes against projections. The lead also develops merchandising and planogram rules, coordinates rotation calendars and reset waves, diagnoses underperforming slots and locations, and uses consumer purchase data to inform assortment and menu decisions. The position builds scalable models, scorecards, rules, and playbooks in partnership with teams across the business.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Business, Economics, Statistics, Marketing, or a related quantitative field.
5–7 years of professional experience, including at least 2 years of direct experience in assortment planning, space planning, merchandising analytics, commercial analytics, or a comparable role; ideally in a business with a physical, space-constrained footprint.
Demonstrated experience making store-, cluster-, or location-level assortment decisions using large, granular transaction or point-of-sale data and measuring results.
Strong data analytics skills and experience building optimization or decision models in Python, R, SQL, or advanced spreadsheet tools.
Working knowledge of space productivity, including facings, adjacencies, and sales and margin per unit of space.
Experience working with AI tools to build analyses faster, while checking outputs for accuracy and managing AI as a tool rather than the primary thinker.
Strong financial acumen, including fluency in product margin, waste, and trade-offs between sales, margin, and sell-through.
High ownership and a bias toward action; comfortable working hands-on, iterating quickly, and driving to answers in a lean, fast-moving environment.

Nice To Haves

Experience with fresh or short-shelf-life products, where waste is part of assortment decisions.
Experience in unattended retail, micro-markets, vending, or convenience.
Experience with localized or cluster-based assortment strategies.
Experience designing and reading in-market tests of assortment or layout changes.
Experience with space-planning or planograms.

Responsibilities

Run and continuously improve optimization models that determine which products go into each fridge and how many slots each product receives, maximizing net product margin within the menu strategy.
Decide which fridges and slots receive new product launches and which products they replace.
Model projected margin, sales, and waste impacts before assortment changes; measure results afterward, explain differences from projections, and improve the models.
Own fridge merchandising, including product placement, facings, and adjacencies across fridge configurations and digital and physical environments.
Develop a point of view on how layout affects customer purchases and translate it into scalable planogram rules.
Own execution of the rotation calendar and planogram reset waves, including which slots change, when rotational and limited-time-offer products enter and exit, and how changes are sequenced.
Partner with Procurement, Operations, and Demand Planning to ensure planogram resets are executed successfully.
Work with Demand Planning to establish sell-through and waste targets, track assortment performance, and diagnose underperforming slots.
Address performance issues such as product choice, placement, stockouts, waste, or local demand in collaboration with Marketing, Operations, Demand Planning, and Menu teams.
Analyze consumer-level purchase data to understand purchasing, repeat behavior, and substitution when customers' usual products are unavailable; partner with Marketing to develop a shared view of customers.
Use evidence from performance data to recommend changes to menu strategy and assortment guardrails.
Partner with Revenue Growth Management and Fridge Lifecycle teams to assess how assortment affects sales and margin, and apply insights to underperforming fridges and retail locations.
Own and improve assortment models, slot-level scorecards, and planogram rules, and document them in repeatable playbooks.

Benefits

Company performance-based bonuses and equity.
Medical, dental, and vision insurance, with multiple plans available.
401(k) with immediate employer match vesting.
Paid time off, including vacation, sick leave, and holidays.
Paid sabbatical after 5 years of service.
Employee discounts.
Employee Assistance Program (EAP).
Daily Farmer's Fridge meals and office snacks.
Employee input in menu creation, including regular tasting panels.
Cross-functional collaboration, open access to leadership, and regular business updates.