My food & drink job: Charlotte Grantham, client partner, Deliveroo

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Charlotte Grantham, Deliveroo

Name: Charlotte Grantham

Age: 29

Job title: Client partner – supermarkets

Company & location: Deliveroo, London

Education: International Management with German at University of Bath

As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up? I wanted to have my own business. I grew up with parents who both had their own businesses and now my sister has her own business as well, so I am part of a very entrepreneurial family!

Why did you decide to go for a career in food & drink? I joined the industry through working for Deliveroo. I wanted to work for Deliveroo as I was inspired by its purpose to provide convenience to customers and loved how customer centric the business was. I also knew I wanted to work in a fast-growing and dynamic industry, which is definitely the case in the food and drink industry at the moment.

”Everything you do is about the customer, and there are so many things affecting the industry at the moment, so you have to be creative”

Describe your job to us in a sentence (or two): I am responsible for the commercial relationships with some of our largest supermarkets on the platform. I manage a small team of account managers, who look after the day-to-day running of the accounts, and I am there to support my team to make sure everything runs smoothly and handle more strategic and contractual workstreams with the retailers I work with.

What does a typical day look like for you? I start the day reviewing performance across my accounts, then have one-to-ones with my team and my manager. I try to have these face to face when I’m in the office as it encourages more open and productive conversations. I’ll normally have a call with one of my retailers where we’ll discuss current priorities and any challenges we need to address.

WR-Deliveroo

I make sure to stop for lunch and then spend time going through my emails and slacks to make sure I’ve responded to everything. Towards the end of the day I’ll have a call with a cross-functional team, either marketing to discuss upcoming plans with our retailers, or operations to talk through priorities for my accounts and how we can improve operational performance with my retailers even further.

Tell us how you went about applying for your job: I applied for the job four years ago, so my memory is a bit hazy! I was approached by a recruiter and then I had four stages of interviews.

One business interview, one company values interview, one case study interview and then a final business interview. I remember really enjoying the case study as the task was to build out a growth plan for an exclusive restaurant partner, which reinforced how much I wanted to join the company.

What’s the best part about working for a food & drink company? Everything you do is about the customer, and there are so many things affecting the industry at the moment, so you have to be creative about how you can sustainably grow your retailers and complement their broader in-store/online operation.

And what’s the biggest misconception people have about working in food & drink? Not sure if it’s a misconception but more a lack of understanding, but I didn’t fully appreciate how changeable an industry it is.

Regardless of whether you are a grocer or restaurant, merchants are heavily affected by political decisions, economic circumstances and policy changes, which put sustained pressure on their operating costs and make it a challenging trading environment. It’s a very resilient industry that is consistently innovating to survive.

What advice would you give to other young people looking to get into the food & drink industry? I think generally my advice would be to stay open-minded and curious. I started my career in operations and at the time was convinced I didn’t want to go into a commercial or marketing role, but actually when I had the opportunity to try out a commercial role after my operations graduate scheme, I loved it and have spent more than half my career in commercial roles.

I also find marketing really interesting and am the commercial lead for marketing in our team. So don’t close yourself off to applying for roles in different teams or functions as you may end up loving it!

What’s your ultimate career dream? I want to be a GM one day as I love being across everything and leading a team. I would also be very interested in setting up my own business. I am very interested in health & wellbeing as well as food, so if I could set up a business across these industries, then that would be amazing.