Location: Bangalore
Experience: 3–8 years
Function: Marketing / Strategy / New Business Initiatives

About the Brand

A leading B2B food ingredients company at the forefront of customized taste, nutrition, and innovation solutions for some of the largest food and beverage brands in India and global markets. The organization is driven by consumer insights, category-first innovation, and future-forward product development.

About the Role

The New Initiatives Manager will lead strategic growth opportunities across emerging categories, innovation-led business opportunities, and whitespace market expansion.

This role will be responsible for identifying high-potential trends, building category stories, developing GTM frameworks, and driving cross-functional execution across Sales, R&D, and Marketing.

The ideal candidate should be equally strong in consumer insighting, category strategy, innovation pipeline development, and stakeholder collaboration.

Key Responsibilities

Category Growth & Opportunity Mapping

• Identify emerging trends, whitespace opportunities, and new growth categories within food ingredients and food service ecosystems

• Conduct in-depth market, competition, and customer research to identify unmet needs

• Build strategic growth roadmaps for new initiatives and innovation-led categories

• Evaluate market attractiveness, scalability, and commercial potential

Innovation Pipeline Development

• Work closely with R&D and commercial teams to build a robust innovation pipeline

• Translate market insights into actionable product concepts and innovation briefs

• Drive customer-led innovation opportunities for strategic accounts

• Ensure timely movement of ideas from concept to pilot to launch

Go-To-Market & Story Building

• Develop compelling category stories, concept narratives, and innovation decks

• Build GTM toolkits, sales enablement materials, and pitch frameworks

• Support customer innovation days, strategic presentations, and business reviews

• Create positioning frameworks for new categories and product launches

Project & Stakeholder Management

• Lead end-to-end execution of new initiative projects across internal stakeholders

• Collaborate with Sales, R&D, Product, and Leadership teams

• Drive alignment on timelines, deliverables, and launch readiness

• Ensure smooth coordination from concept development to market rollout

Portfolio & Strategic Expansion

• Identify portfolio gaps and future growth opportunities

• Recommend adjacent categories and strategic expansion opportunities

• Build long-term innovation roadmap aligned with business priorities

• Support leadership in evaluating new business models, partnerships, and category entries

You Should Have

• 5–8 years of experience in category marketing / innovation / new initiatives / brand strategy

• Prior experience in food ingredients, FMCG, food services, or B2B food ecosystem

• Strong understanding of consumer trends, market research, and category development

• Proven ability to work cross-functionally with Sales and R&D

• Excellent storytelling, presentation, and stakeholder management skills

• Strong analytical and strategic thinking capability

Ideal Fit

Someone who can spot trends early, build new categories from scratch, and drive market expansion initiatives with strong commercial thinking.

About WinnerBrands

At WinnerBrands, we are on a mission to create a community of the brightest marketing minds to deliver impactful, rewarding, and purposeful work by collaborating, contributing & co-learning with smart peers. Backed by Busybeebrands.com, a pioneering brand-building firm that has helped some of the most disruptive new-age brands in the country craft their brand and marketing strategy, we find opportunities with progressives startups and brands in the domain of marketing with multiple engagement models for our talent partners, freelance / part-time or full-time. Request to visit our community page at https://www.winnerbrands.in/talentcommunity/

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Thanks,

WinnerBrands Team