Global Senior Buyer for Dairy Ingredients – Whey & Derivatives

Global Senior Buyer for Dairy Ingredients – Whey & Derivatives

Hoofddorp/Hybrid

As a strategic leader within Danone’s global procurement organization, the Global Senior Buyer for Dairy Ingredients – Whey & Derivatives is responsible for shaping and executing the global sourcing strategy for a high-impact category with a spend of €150M. This role drives value creation through deep market intelligence, supplier innovation, and strategic stakeholder engagement across geographies. Operating in a complex, fast-paced environment, the role is pivotal in delivering sustainable business results, mitigating risk, and advancing Danone’s ESG and Impact Journey objectives.

Main Responsibilities:

• Define and lead the global category strategy for Low Whey and Demineralised Whey, aligned with business priorities and stakeholder needs.
• Translate market insights and cost structure analysis into actionable sourcing strategies.
• Build and maintain a robust pipeline of productivity and value-creation initiatives.
• Lead end-to-end sourcing processes, including go-to-market strategy, tendering, negotiation, and supplier award decisions.
• Ensure strategic supplier engagement post-tender to deliver long-term value.
• Oversee execution of commercial agreements in alignment with legal and compliance standards.
• Influence and collaborate with senior internal stakeholders across R&I, Quality, Operations, Finance, and Legal.
• Develop and maintain strategic supplier relationships, leveraging SRM to drive innovation and performance.
• Represent Danone externally with suppliers, farmers, industry boards, and regulatory bodies.
• Own financial planning and forecasting for the category, including budget alignment, variance tracking, and savings delivery.
• Proactively identify and mitigate category-specific and macro-level risks.
• Champion ESG initiatives within the category, embedding sustainability metrics into supplier partnerships.
• Contribute to the broader Danone Impact Journey through responsible sourcing and innovation.

About you

To be successful in this role, you have:

• Bachelor’s Degree in procurement, business, food science.
• 7+ years in Procurement experience in a related field (ingredients within FMCG company).
• Enjoy working in a fast-paced entrepreneurial environment and has creativity to solve problems and oriented for value creation.
• Pragmatism, “hands on” mentality, with strategic business approach.
• Ability to navigate in ambiguous environment, tenacity with strong adaptation and relationship capabilities, to gain credibility and create an efficient network within regions and suppliers.
• Fluent in English

Skills and competencies:

• In-depth experience in strategic sourcing of relevant categories
• Knowledge and experience of world-class category management and sourcing practices from one or several world-class companies.
• Experienced in managing sourcing categories across multiple geographies.
• Strong commercial and business acumen and negotiation skills.
• Strong results-orientation and proven track record of consistent outstanding performance and results delivery
• Strong ability to lead, influence, collaborate, and effectively engage multiple stakeholders.
• Strong analytical and quantitative skills.
• Presence to engage effectively with senior supplier stakeholders.
• Creative and continuously looking for stretching value-adding opportunities.
• Resilience and collaboration.
• Proven ability to build strong supplier relationships to achieve business goals.
• Experienced in autonomously managing all procurement aspects of a category.

About Danone

At Danone we are committed to our mission “bringing health, through food to as many people as possible”. Working together to make sure that our brands, like Hipro, Nutricia, Alpro, Activia, Nutrilon and Evian, create real benefits for people, communities and the planet. You will be part of one of the largest Certified B Corps™ in the world.

Cycles & Procurement is right at the heart of making the Danone vision One Planet. Through what and how we source, we shape the world in which we operate & we build the future for Danone. With our Cycles we protect and secure our key resources (Milk, Water and Plastic) & we take a strategic approach to Procurement to support the business and social agenda of Danone. We secure competitive, sustainable resources, seek innovative solutions, and partner up with suppliers aligned to our vision.

We offer:

All Danoners receive a complete package of benefits. This includes a competitive salary and yearly bonus, a premium free pension, 30 days of annual leave (with the opportunity to purchase more) and you will receive a monthly health care allowance. In addition, you can get discount on your gym membership, and we offer initiatives focused on nutrition, physical, and mental health. We provide continuous learning opportunities through workshops, online courses and training sessions.