Alan Richardson
Alan Richardson – Sector Marketing Manager
I have always worked in the food industry even as far back as summer jobs whilst being a student. My first full time role was marketing chilled prepared seafood products at Bluecrest. As I worked mainly in a small business unit, I inevitably ended up doing a huge range of different things which gave me an excellent grounding in the food industry. It also proved to me that I wanted to focus on Marketing and that to progress I needed to move to a larger company which would train and develop me and offer me long-term career prospects.
In 1999 I applied for the role of a Dips & Dressings Marketing Analyst and after two interviews, it was clear to see Bakkavor’s commitment to recruiting the right people, developing and retaining them. That, coupled with the people that I met through the interview process, convinced me that this was the right place to progress my career.
Whilst I’ve worked exclusively in Marketing roles at Bakkavor the exact nature of these roles have differed greatly. My first role was very numbers based – generating market numbers, presenting these internally and then driving these through into category reviews. As I progressed on to being a Marketing Manager, I inevitably took a greater role in leading the category review process and working on business and market strategies. I also had a spell working very closely with one of our key customers when we originally became their Category Captains for Dips/Dressed Salads back in 2000. Since moving out of prepared foods into prepared produce in 2004, my role has become more about the future direction of our prepared produce markets.
It would be fair to say that I enjoy the variety that I get with this role. It could be good old number crunching, talking to growers, presenting to retailers, developing market plans and business strategy, talking to consumers, working on PR campaigns, looking at new varieties in the field – the list of what we do is incredibly broad.
I will always enjoy the basics of what we do – taking a whole range of information, interpreting it and then communicating back out so that it means something. Essentially getting underneath the skin of the market to understand not just what it happening, but why it is happening. It’s also good to know that much of what we do is driving real change within Bakkavor and across the markets that we operate in.