Product Buyer

Aimee Brown

When it comes to identifying the best-quality food products on the market, Deb Cooksey knows her average apples from her organic oranges. Cooksey is head product buyer at Macro Wholefoods, an organic and natural supermarket chain that started 22 years ago in Bondi Junction.

As head buyer, Cooksey is responsible for every product that ends up on the Macro Wholefoods shelves, from fresh fruit and vegetables to gelatine-free jelly for vegans. Cooksey liaises with more than 300 suppliers and there are between 3000 and 4000 different products on shelves at any one time, so good organisational skills are a must.

But she says it’s not just about stocking shelves with just any organic products she can find. “My first preference is to find a certified organic product, but if I can’t find that then I’ll look for the next best thing, which is a natural product,” she says. “If there are Australian producers doing what we’re looking for, we want to support them as much as we can. But if it’s not produced here, we’ll look overseas.”

Cooksey’s involvement with supermarkets began when her parents bought a small local supermarket in Ballarat. She worked there as a teenager and when she moved to Melbourne to do a marketing degree, she worked at Safeway before being offered a role as a buyer for the chain.

Qualifications: You can work as a product buyer without formal qualifications, but experience in the retail industry is essential. Most buyers start in sales positions before moving into purchasing. To prepare for a job as a buyer, you can also do a Certificate IV in Retail Management at TAFE or a degree in business marketing.

Course description: The Certificate IV in Retail Management is aimed at people who want to work in retail at a managerial level. Course electives include stock ordering and maintenance, purchasing, merchandising and product recommendations. Course material is delivered though different methods, including practical activities, role plays, industry case studies and individual and team projects.

Costs: A Certificate IV at TAFE is $408 for one semester and $816 per year (2007).

From the inside: Deb Cooksey says women are well represented in the retail product buying industry, but it hasn’t always been that way. “When I started 15 years ago, I was one of the first women to be buying food,” she says. “At that point it was really male-dominated. Now if you look at the retail environment there are lots of women working in it.”

She says a job highlight is constantly discovering new and exciting products. “I have this constant exposure to different types of foods and along the way I’m always learning about new things or products that are a little bit different to others on the market.”

* More information: Australian Retailers’ Association, 02 9290 3766 or http://www.ara.com.au/home.html

By Aimee Brown, The Daily Telegraph, September 16,  2006.