Demand & Strategic Planning Manager

Dandelion Chocolate•San Francisco, CA

50d•Hybrid

About The Position

Dandelion Chocolate is seeking a Demand & Strategic Planning Manager to join their Inventory Management team. This role is central to all business operations, including production, receiving, retail, wholesale, and online sales, with oversight of finished goods. The manager will ensure optimal product availability, prevent stockouts, and provide accurate business intelligence reports using multiple systems. They will also collaborate with Product Management, Creative, and Marketing teams to forecast new item sales and profitability. No two days are alike in this dynamic role. Responsibilities include developing sales expectations for new items launching in the future, aligning inventory needs with changes in marketing spend, creating six-month forecasts, updating inventory needs, and reallocating inventory across channels. The manager will also present category-level forecasts to the Executive Team, potentially in relation to business expansion strategies.

Requirements

Two to five years of experience in sales forecasting or item-level planning.
Expertise with spreadsheets, reporting, and presentations including Google Suite.
Desire to learn and apply new technologies, especially.
Previous technical know-how with the desire and ability to research and pick up new tools like AI-enabled tool building platforms, Shopify, warehouse management systems, back-order management systems, Square, etc.
Working knowledge of data warehousing and advanced analytics systems.
Authorized to work in the U.S.

Nice To Haves

Planning experience within the food world.
Previous experience in a friendly professional environment or in another team-oriented setting.
Proven Vendor Relationship Skills: Maintained strong, multi-year vendor relationships including suppliers, distributors, reps - both domestically and internationally - over many years while also negotiating rates and handling missed expectations.

Responsibilities

Create and maintain weekly item-level demand and sales forecasts, and set stock notifications.
Strategize inventory balance targets and inbound delivery flow.
Understand and manage the bill of materials for interrelatedness of raw materials and components.
Oversee product sales life-cycle by participating in launch planning, managing replenishment deliveries and executing sell-down / sell-out strategies.
Place purchase orders with outside finished goods vendors, packaging / collateral suppliers, cafe supplies manufacturers, etc.
Keep items in stock through inventory balancing across all sales channels and retail locations.
Monitor marketing efforts to react in-season to unexpected fluctuations in demand.
Partner with outside vendors and internal manufacturing teams to adjust timing of receipts.
Utilize early-receipt, Buy Now Ship Later and other back-order management techniques to maximize profitable availability of goods.
Maintain, publish and present weekly and monthly sales and business intelligence reports with the Executive team and cross-functional partners.
Define, create and present ad hoc analyses to facilitate a wide variety of business decisions, determining outcomes of different possible scenarios, answer “what if” questions, etc.
Share demand forecasts with MPM to ensure chocolate allocations and production schedules cover future needs.
Ensure Confections / SF & LV Kitchen and Product Packaging / Making teams have accurate demand forecasts from which appropriate production schedules can be built.
Utilize AI or other technologies to evolve tools, automate repetitive steps, improve decision-making, build new reports, etc. to improve productivity and enhance business intelligence.
Build and use expertise in the Data Warehouse and associated reporting systems.
Monitor best-by dates to ensure that food items are being sold at an appropriate pace to minimize waste.
Partner with DC production teams and outside vendors to create and manage retail samples.
Lead SKU creation process for new products / components / supplies, and issue and manage purchase orders.
Build and maintain total spend forecasts across all planned items, providing monthly forecasts to Finance and the Executive team.
Perform other tasks as necessary.