Global Sustainability Demand Manager H/F/X

Job Description:

Segment : Royal Canin

Contract : CDI/Permanent

Location : Aimargues, near to Montpellier

This role's mission is to create value out of Royal Canin's significant sustainability credentials and assets, turning them into brand equity, customer trust, and business growth.

The Global Sustainability Demand Lead sits at the intersection of Demand and Sustainability — primarily translating sustainability activities into commercial value, while also bringing a Demand perspective into shaping sustainability strategy itself.

This role acts as the Center of Excellence for Sustainability and Demand, owning the sustainability agenda and strategy across all Demand functions, spanning the full arc from strategic direction to operational implementation — across three main areas/ Innovation & Portfolio, Communication & Activation, and Enablers.

Reports to the Global Innovation Director, with a dotted line to the Global Sustainability VP.

What are we looking for ?

• Bachelor’s degree or higher (preferred) in Business Management, Marketing, or related fields.
• Business Experience: 8+ years of total business experience, with at least 5+ years of direct experience in a Demand role.
• Sustainability Literacy: Sound understanding of sustainable practices and principles, paired with a strong passion for sustainability, and willingness to learn. Prior experience in successfully integrating sustainability into major global brands is a major plus.
• Strategic & Operational Duality: Proven ability to operate seamlessly across both strategic and operational horizons - capable of building high-level, long-term strategic plans and equally comfortable rolling up their sleeves to turn them into concrete, day-to-day operational action.
• Stakeholder Influence: Demonstrated ability to work effectively with cross-functional teams and influence stakeholders at all levels of the organization.
• Communication & Networking: Excellent communication, relationship-building, and networking skills.
• Resilience & Mission-Driven Mindset: Comfortable working toward a purpose-driven mission amidst varying interests across the organization. Possesses the independence to stand alone, the courage to stand up for the agenda, and the personal resilience to champion a topic that is not always the priority for the Demand team.

What would be your key responsibilities ?

This role leads the sustainability agenda for the demand organization, acting as a strategic owner and a central point of consultation. Responsibilities are structured across four key pillars:

1. Sustainability Leadership & Strategy

• Own the Demand Sustainability Roadmap: Update and govern the sustainability Demand Vision, Strategy, and activation roadmap for the global demand organization, ensuring alignment with Royal Canin's overall business objectives.
• Act as the "Voice of Demand": Represent Demand within the Royal Canin and Mars Petcare Sustainability matrix. Contribute to corporate sustainability agenda by injecting critical insights from the pet ecosystem (pet owners, veterinarians, and retailers).

2. Portfolio & Innovation

• Unlock Sustainability Value Proposition: Define and lead the sustainability choices for our global portfolio, ensuring it is systematically linked to our overall Portfolio Architecture and Innovation pipeline. Through this strategy, identify and capture value proposition opportunities across the portfolio, realized either through physical innovations or renovations (product, packaging, or service) or through meaningful and distinctive product claims.

• Scientific Substantiation & Certifications: Partner with R&D, Corporate Affairs, and scientific teams to develop robust sustainability proof points (e.g., scientific research on climate/environmental impacts on pet health) and secure recognized third-party sustainability certifications to structurally validate our portfolio's credentials.
• Sustainable Innovation Governance: Seamlessly embed sustainability assessments and target-setting directly into the end-to-end innovation process, ensuring every new pipeline project actively contributes to Royal Canin's global sustainability targets from concept to launch.

3. Communication & Activation:

• Sustainability Communication Framework: Own the Global Sustainability Brand and Commercial Communication strategy, defining the brand's core sustainability narrative and its communication channels. Partner with global functions—Global Innovation, VCMs, Brand & Corporate Communication, POX—to embed this narrative consistently across Royal Canin's Integrated Communication Architecture and Activation Plans.
• Claims Center of Excellence (CoE): Act as the ultimate strategic owner for sustainability product claims, defining and managing the global sustainability claim roadmap. Either develop claims independently or guide and consult other global/local teams in doing so. Lead the full end-to-end process from claim development and cross-functional approval (R&D, Legal, RA, Mars) to the creation of deployment toolkits.
• Enable with Assets: Translate approved claims into high-impact market assets and equip markets with a repository of demand-related sustainability assets. While asset development is a shared responsibility with Global Innovation, VCMs, POX, and Brand & Corporate Communication, this role drives development of key global 'lighthouse activations.
• Support Customer Engagement: Support local markets in engaging their customers on sustainability and help them efficiently respond to customer-led sustainability queries. Focus on enabling markets to manage customers by providing standard selling stories, response, and pitch guidelines.
• Value Tracking & Quantification: Track and quantify the tangible value that sustainability adds to Royal Canin by defining, monitoring, and sharing key performance indicators (KPIs) related to brand equity, retailer trust, and commercial growth.

4. Capabilities & Enablers:

• Evolving Sustainability Insights: Partner with the Insights team to generate and consolidate sustainability insights and competitive intelligence, ensuring evolving category, pet owner, and retailer trends are actively reflected in our demand plans.
• Embed in Commercial Governance: Integrate sustainability criteria, metrics, and targets directly into core demand processes and frameworks (e.g. IVCP, QuEST, NPR, IAP).
• Upskill the Demand Community: Ensure global, regional, and local demand associates are informed, engaged, and actively empowered to embed sustainability into their daily work through training, toolkits, and guidelines.

What can you expect from Mars ?

• You will work in a multicultural environment (more than 40 nationalities) and where your dog will be welcomed by more than 100 other Associates’ dogs at the office!

• You will work in a unique campus, which gathers more than 800 Associates working for: the international HQ, the French subsidiary, two laboratories, a kennel and a cattery with more than 200 cats & dogs, and finally the most important factory of the Royal Canin group

• A unique and ideal work environment to become the leader in health through nutrition for cats and dogs!

• You will evolve in the heart of an innovative production plant that will challenge you, on a daily basis

Royal Canin's CSR commitments, to build a better world for tomorrow:

• Since 2015, no waste to landfill is made by the 16 Royal Canin factories in the world

• All Royal Canin products manufactured in Europe are ISO 14001 certified from design to factory gate

• Since 2017, Royal Canin has supported the K-DOG program of the Curie Institute, which trains dogs to detect breast cancer via olfaction.