Sr Manager Consumer Insights & Strategy

About Us:

Trilliant Food & Nutrition is a leading manufacturer of premium coffees and powdered beverages, proudly headquartered in Little Chute, Wisconsin. With a legacy rooted in quality, innovation, and service, Trilliant delivers branded and private label solutions across retail, foodservice, and e-commerce channels.

Horseshoe Beverage Company, based in Neenah, WI, is a leading ready-to-drink beverage manufacturer dedicated to delivering an exceptional beverage experience. By combining industry-leading talent and cutting-edge equipment, we drive innovation and consistently deliver the highest quality products to our customers—first and fast.

Our brand portfolio includes Victor Allen’s®, Dutch Bros® beverages and Nurri™, our better-for-you protein beverage line. We are passionate about beverages – and about building a team that’s just as energized. We invite you to explore opportunities at Trilliant or Horseshoe, to see if your talents and career aspirations may fit with our openings.

Position Overview:

The Senior Manager, Consumer Insights & Strategy will lead the development of an enterprise consumer insights capability designed to improve decisions across brand strategy, innovation, portfolio development, activation, and long-term growth.

This role will serve as a strategic thought partner to Marketing and business leadership while building the foundational processes, methodologies, vendor partnerships, and operating standards required to create a consistent and scalable Consumer Insights capability across the organization.

The role requires a combination of strategic thinking, strong research expertise, business acumen, and a builder mentality. The successful candidate will be equally comfortable challenging a business question, designing a research approach, managing external partners, synthesizing complex information, and translating insights into recommendations for senior leadership.

Responsibilities:

• Establish standardized consumer research processes, methodologies, tools, templates, and quality standards across the organization.
• Develop consistent research intake, scoping, prioritization, and approval process.
• Establish clear research briefs and expectations for study design, analysis, reporting, and recommendations.
• Build and manage a preferred external vendor ecosystem across qualitative, quantitative, innovation, product, packaging, and other research needs.
• Establish guidelines for when different methodologies and external partners should be used.
• Create a centralized repository for existing research and institutional knowledge.
• Reduce duplicated research and improve leverage of prior consumer learning.
• Identify opportunities to use AI and emerging research technologies to improve speed, quality, accessibility, and cost.
• Partner with Marketing, Innovation, and BU leadership to establish annual, quarterly, and monthly learning agendas.
• Translate business strategies and challenges into clearly defined learning priorities.
• Identify the most important unanswered questions affecting brand, innovation, portfolio, and growth decisions.
• Determine what is already known, what can be answered through existing information, and where new research is required.
• Prioritize research investments based on strategic importance, business impact, risk, and cost.
• Proactively identify emerging consumer needs, behaviors, occasions, and potential growth opportunities.
• Build and continuously strengthen understanding of:
• Consumer needs, attitudes, motivations, and behaviors
• Consumer segmentation and targeting
• Usage occasions and need states
• Brand positioning and differentiation
• Brand health and equity
• Consumer decision journeys
• Category and cultural trends
• Emerging consumer behaviors
• Product and benefit preferences
• Claims and messaging
• Packaging and communication
• Value and price perceptions
• Synthesize research, existing data, marketplace information, and other relevant sources into a holistic perspective on the consumer and implications for the business.
• Partner with Marketing, Innovation, and R&D to establish a consistent ‘agile’ consumer learning framework across: Opportunity → Concept → Proposition → Product → Optimization → Validation → Launch → Post-Launch Learning
• Establish clear principles for the appropriate level of consumer evidence required at each stage while balancing rigor, speed, cost, and business risk. Move beyond reporting research findings to identify clear implications, recommendations, and actions.
• Integrate multiple research and data sources rather than relying on individual studies in isolation.
• Challenge assumptions and help leadership clarify the underlying business decision before initiating research.
• Translate consumer understanding into implications for brand strategy, innovation, portfolio, activation, and growth.
• Develop compelling, executive-ready narratives that simplify complex information.
• Present findings and recommendations to senior business leaders.
• Advocate for the consumer while maintaining a strong commercial and financial orientation.
• Develop deep understanding of each BU's strategy, brands, consumers, innovation pipeline, and growth priorities.
• Serve as the primary Consumer Insights partner to Marketing and BU leadership.
• Participate in strategic planning, innovation, portfolio, and brand discussions where consumer understanding can materially improve decisions.
• Balance enterprise consistency with the distinct needs of individual brands and businesses.
• Help develop increasingly dedicated Consumer Insights support for BUs as organizational scale and complexity increase.

Qualifications:

• Approximately 8–12+ years of progressive Consumer Insights, Market Research, or related experience.
• Bachelor’s degree in marketing or business required.
• Strong preference for CPG, food, beverage, nutrition, or another consumer-driven industry.
• Experience within a sophisticated Consumer Insights organization with exposure to strong research standards and methodologies.
• Demonstrated experience building, improving, or standardizing research capabilities.
• Strong qualitative and quantitative research expertise.
• Significant brand and innovation research experience.
• Experience managing external research vendors and research budgets.
• Strong strategic and analytical problem-solving capabilities.
• Demonstrated ability to translate research into business recommendations.
• Strong executive communication and storytelling skills.
• Ability to influence senior cross-functional stakeholders without direct authority.
• Strong commercial and financial acumen.

Hours, Location and Pay:

We offer a competitive base pay rate and benefits package for full-time employees. This role works at our Little Chute, WI manufacturing facility or remotely with occasional travel to Little Chute, WI.

Physical and Mental Demands:

• While performing the duties of this job, the employee is frequently required to sit, hear, use hands to type data, use a personal computer and telephone. This employee may occasionally have to operate business machines and lift and/move up to 50 pounds.
• Specific vision abilities required in this job include close vision and the ability to adjust focus. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.
• Mental demands include multi-tasking, decision making, problem solving, comparing, copying, computing, compiling, analyzing, coordinating, and synthesizing data.
• Potential for exposure to chemicals, heights, loud noises, mechanical equipment, wet environments, and other potential hazards exists.

Safety Statement:

At Trilliant and Horseshoe, safety is every employee’s first responsibility. We expect all employees to adhere to all safety practices, have the moral courage to stop other individuals from performing unsafe acts, and immediately report unsafe conditions.

Disclosures:

• The above statements are intended to describe the general nature and level of work being performed by people assigned to this classification. They are not to be construed as an exhaustive list of all responsibilities, duties, and skills required of personnel so classified. All personnel may be required to perform duties outside of their normal responsibilities from time to time, as needed.
• Responsible for following food safety/regulatory policies and procedures, executing responsibilities as identified in standard operating procedures, and reporting food safety/regulatory concerns to the Production or Quality Manager.
• Trilliant Food & Nutrition and Horseshoe Beverage Company are Drug Free Workplaces. All applicants are subject to a drug screen and background check as a condition of employment.
• Trilliant Food and Nutrition and Horseshoe Beverage participate in the E-Verify process.
• EEO/AA including Vets and Disabled
• If you need a reasonable accommodation for any part of the employment process, please contact us by email at View email address on click.appcast.io and let us know the nature of your request and your contact information.
• Trilliant Food and Nutrition and Horseshoe Beverage are Equal Opportunity Employers.
• The principles of the OECD and UN have been taken into consideration and used as guidance in our human rights practices and procedures.