Principal Program Manager, Whole Foods Market Central Kitchen Strategy, Whole Foods Market Culinary Merchandising

Job description

Whole Foods Market is seeking a Principal Program Manager to help shape the future of how we produce freshly prepared food in centralized commissary kitchens. This is a strategic, senior role for someone who thrives in ambiguity and can define strategy where little exists today. Working across Amazon VP organizations and with senior leadership at WFM and Amazon, you will lead a significant, complex initiative from concept through execution, building the business case, aligning stakeholders, and standing up the mechanisms needed to deliver.

The ideal candidate pairs deep strategic program management experience with a strong understanding of food service, kitchen production, supply chain, food safety, and multi-unit retail operations, and can influence and align senior leaders across culinary merchandising, supply chain, operations, finance, and technology.

Key job responsibilities

- Own the vision, strategy, and multi-year roadmap for a significant, complex initiative, driving clarity where the business problem and strategy are not yet fully defined.

- Build out business cases and financial plans, framing capital, operational, and strategic tradeoffs for senior leaders and grounding recommendations in data.

- Partner across merchandising, supply chain, operations, quality assurance and food safety, finance, technology, and other functional teams to align the organization on a coherent operating model and clear ownership.

- Establish the planning, forecasting, and performance mechanisms needed to run the program and measure its success.

- Design and launch pilots to validate our strategy, including clear learning plans, and create the stage gates that govern how and when the program scales.

- Prepare and drive executive-ready reviews, business cases, and PR/FAQ and narrative documents, representing complex decisions and tradeoffs clearly to VPs and, when needed, SVPs.

- Identify and mitigate program risks, building in the redundancy and contingency needed to protect continuity of service to stores and customers.

- Actively develop the program management community through mentoring, promotion assessments, and best-practice sharing.

- Travel Requirements: Approximately 30% travel to facilities, stores, and partner sites may be required.

About the team

Our team is at the heart of transforming how customers experience fresh, prepared food at Whole Foods Market and Worldwide Grocery Stores. We set the category strategy and define production models that shape what lands on shelves and in shopping baskets across hundreds of stores nationwide. We work at the intersection of food, data, operations, and retail, partnering closely with supply chain, private brands, operations, e-commerce, finance, and technology to bring innovative, high-quality food programs to life.

Our culture rewards curiosity, deep ownership, and creative problem-solving. If you are energized by building something new that directly shapes what customers eat every day, this is the team for you.