Demand Planner (f/m/x)

The role: What's in the Box We're looking for a highly technical Demand Planner who blends deep forecasting expertise with strong data engineering skills. This is a hands-on analytical role: you must have a proven track record of applying SQL specifically to demand planning and forecasting data. You'll spend your time writing queries to build reports, run deep-dive analyses, validate demand models, and use your planning expertise to drive operational decisions. You'll support the demand signal that dictates every operational decision at HelloFresh, from how much food we order to how many staff we schedule and how many trucks we book. Your work directly contributes to reducing food waste, improving product availability, managing labour costs, and protecting customer experience for millions of meals across Europe. Our Demand Planning team is evolving into a new structure that splits the ownership of the final demand numbers from the ownership of the forecasting methods. You will contribute to that transformation, supporting country-level market planners and category experts to build next-generation forecasting capabilities, while keeping daily supply chain execution accurate and ensuring market inputs are aligned on time. What you’ll do: The Recipe • Data Extraction & Modeling for Insights: Write and maintain SQL queries to extract, transform, and analyse demand data across cloud platforms (e.g., Databricks, Snowflake). Ensure the data is structured to power accurate forecasting models, test hypotheses, and generate clear business takeaways. • Dashboard Creation: Build and maintain automated reporting using visualisation tools (e.g., Tableau, Genie) that give stakeholders access to operational KPIs such as forecast accuracy, bias, waste risk, and availability. • Pipeline Scalability: Work alongside forecast engineers and senior analysts to support scalable pipelines, ensuring local market nuances are handled within the unified codebase. • AI Integration: Use AI tools (e.g., Gemini, Claude) to speed up everyday tasks like writing SQL, debugging queries, and summarising data; we encourage experimentation to help the team work smarter. • Plan Generation: Support the creation and validation of daily and weekly demand plans for European markets, ensuring the Decision-Time forecast is accurate at the exact moment Procurement and Production need to act. • Trend Monitoring: Monitor trends and seasonality using a data-driven approach, flagging when the plan needs adjusting and escalating where appropriate. • Performance Tracking: Track forecast performance against KPIs (MAPE, bias) and their downstream impact on waste and fulfilment, surfacing findings that help the team improve. • Proactive Data Quality & QA: Act as the first line of defence for forecast reliability. Own the day-to-day data validation across demand pipelines, proactively identifying anomalies, flagging data breaks, and ensuring all inputs are clean before they influence the final plan. • Deviation Root Cause Analysis: Whenever deviations between the forecast and actuals occur, lead deep-dive investigations to identify the underlying drivers. Translate these findings into immediate, actionable • S&OP Participation: Participate in the weekly operational planning cycle, preparing materials and analysis for meetings with Market Leadership, Logistics, Production, and Procurement. • Commercial & Marketing Alignment: Partner with Marketing and Commercial teams to ensure growth campaigns, promotions, and new product launches are accurately quantified and integrated into the demand view long before they impact the supply chain. • Automated Insights & Communication: Build and maintain automated alerts that instantly communicate missing feeds and forecast anomalies to the right stakeholders. The goal is to catch problems early and prevent downstream operational disruptions before they happen. • adjustments that improve the demand plan and mitigate operational risk