Strategic Marketing Manager (Full- Time)

Welcome To Denninger's

Denninger’s has been in the business of great food since 1954. What began as a family enterprise in Hamilton is now a third-generation specialty European grocer and prepared-foods manufacturer, with four stores across the Hamilton–Burlington corridor, an in-store bistro, a growing wholesale business, and a plant that turns out hundreds of products by hand every day.

The distinction that matters most: Denninger’s does not simply sell great food; it makes it. Our 60,000-square-foot production facility in Hamilton handles the full chain from meat processing and smoking through cooking, chilling and packaging, producing more than 200 specialty cold cuts, sausages and smoked meats alongside over 100 prepared fine foods. Manufacturing accounts for roughly half of company sales. That vertical integration, from the smokehouse to the shelf, is what sets Denninger’s apart in a category where most competitors sell what someone else made.

Inside each store sits our BiteHaus Bistro, a grocery-restaurant hybrid built on German street food, plus e-commerce, catering, and a gift-basket business that comes alive every holiday season. Roughly 280 people work here, many of them for decades. The customers are just as loyal: people drive past three other grocery stores to shop here, and they have been doing it for generations.

Denninger’s is now building its marketing department in-house. It is a deliberate investment in the brand: putting strategy, content, and customer growth in the hands of people who work inside the business, know the products, walk the plant floor, and can build the kind of institutional knowledge that only comes from being here.

Opportunity Overview

We are seeking a Strategic Marketing Manager to build and run Denninger’s internal marketing department. The plan, the budget, the calendar, the reporting, and the working rhythm of the team are all yours to shape.

Reporting to the Merchandising and Marketing Manager and working closely with the CEO, this position owns the marketing plan and the results it produces. It is a hands-on leadership role: the person who sets the strategy is also the person who runs the paid media, writes the copy that carries the brand, and builds the presentation that wins the room. For a marketer who has been waiting for full ownership of a function, this is that job.

The role comes with real support. An external marketing consultant is on the ground through the build, handing over systems, relationships, and context, and working alongside this position until the department is running on its own. What follows is an opportunity that rarely comes up: leading marketing for an established, profitable, seventy-year-old brand with exceptional products to talk about and considerable room to grow.

Role Details

The Strategic Marketing Manager is accountable for what marketing produces and what it returns. The work divides across strategy and planning, customer growth, measurement, and leading a small, capable team.

Strategy, Planning And Budget

This is the centre of the role. Responsibilities include:

• Building the annual marketing plan and revising it quarterly against business priorities
• Owning the marketing budget end to end — allocation, pacing, re-forecasting, and making the case for the investment
• Setting priorities each quarter and keeping the team focused on them
• Partnering with merchandising on seasonal and promotional planning, and translating category strategy into marketing execution
• Representing marketing at the leadership level and in front of the board, in terms the business already uses
• Negotiating vendor rates and maintaining the media kit and co-op advertising program

Customer Growth: Paid Media And Local Search

Denninger’s is a destination retailer with a devoted customer base and a large surrounding market that has yet to discover it. This role owns the levers that bring new people through the door:

• Campaign structure, audience definition, budget pacing, and optimization across Meta and Google
• Google Business Profile management across all four locations — accuracy, posts, photography, questions and answers, and review generation
• Setting a clear objective and success measure for every campaign before it launches
• Weekly decisions on where to put the money behind what is working
• Testing into new acquisition channels and building on what proves out

Measurement And Reporting

Building the reporting discipline that shows leadership exactly what marketing is doing and what it is returning:

• Owning the monthly reporting pack — its narrative, its interpretation, and its presentation to leadership
• Reporting against transactions and online sales, the two measures marketing is accountable for
• Closing out campaigns against the objectives set at launch and applying what each one teaches
• Producing the quarterly vendor and co-op reporting pack
• Establishing the measurement infrastructure the department will run on for years

Team Leadership And Prioritization

• Leading a team of two: a Content and Design Specialist and a Marketing Operations Specialist
• Running standing one-to-ones and developing both reports
• Running the weekly intake session — reviewing requests from across the business, prioritizing against capacity, scheduling, and confirming timelines back to requesters
• Giving the wider business a clear, reliable route for getting marketing support
• Directing specialist external partners in photography and regulated packaging

Sales, Vendor And Communication Support

• Presentation and document templates the wider business can use
• Wholesale and account presentations supporting the growth of the branded portfolio
• Vendor co-op materials — rate card, package definitions, asset specifications
• Internal communications that reach a workforce spread across four stores, a bistro and a plant
• The writing across the department: long-form, customer-facing, and executive copy

Brand Stewardship

Denninger’s has a mature visual identity documented in a brand standards guide. Writing the strategy layer above it — positioning, value proposition, voice and tone — is one of the defining opportunities of this role, alongside maintaining the standards, governing the template library, and keeping brand execution consistent across every location.

Merchandising And In-Store Projects

Each quarter brings a defined in-store project alongside the ongoing work — scoping with merchandising, specification, sourcing, supplier coordination, physical review, and installation planning. Bringing the brand to life consistently across all four stores is a stated priority of the business, and it lands substantially here.

Candidate Profile

The right person for this role is a marketer who likes running things. Comfortable owning a number in front of a CEO, comfortable setting priorities and holding them, and happy to roll up their sleeves and make the work themselves. This is a small team inside a company that makes things by hand, and the leadership here is genuine.

They should be someone who enjoys building systems as much as campaigns: the reporting, the planning rhythm, the working relationships that make a department credible. Much of that gets built from a clean sheet, which is the appeal.

Paid media fluency is a core requirement. This is the growth budget, and this role owns it directly. Strong writing matters too. The brand’s voice, its long-form storytelling, and its executive communication all run through this seat.

And a real interest in food goes a long way. Much of this job is spent on a plant floor and in four stores, learning products well enough to sell them properly.

Professional Experience

• 5–8 years of progressive marketing experience, including responsibility for a budget and a plan
• Demonstrated ownership of paid media — building, running, and optimizing campaigns directly
• Experience reporting marketing performance to executives or ownership
• Track record of leading or directing others
• Strong project management, prioritization and stakeholder-management skills

Industry Knowledge

• Understanding of retail, grocery, food, hospitality or another business where the customer walks through a door
• Familiarity with promotional calendars, vendor co-op advertising and trade programs is a strong advantage
• Appreciation for brands built over decades rather than campaigns

Technical Skills

• Meta Ads Manager and Google Ads, including Performance Max and local campaigns
• Google Business Profile, Google Analytics, and local search fundamentals
• Email marketing platforms and list management
• Shopify or comparable e-commerce familiarity
• Building presentations and documents to a professional standard
• Working knowledge of design tools sufficient to direct creative and produce from templates

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building an in-house marketing function
• Background bringing agency-held work onto an internal team
• Exposure to EOS or a comparable operating framework
• Consumer packaged goods, private label, or wholesale marketing experience

Job Details

Time Commitment - Full-time, on-site across the Hamilton-Burlington locations and the plant.

Reports To - Merchandising and Marketing Manager

Direct Reports - Content and Design Specialist, Marketing Operations Specialist

Compensation- $65,000 - $75,000 per year

Start Date - January 4, 2027 (Currently Hiring)

How To Apply - Please submit your resume, a cover letter, and professional references to [email protected].

Consider Including Examples Of:

• A marketing plan or budget you owned
• Paid media performance you were accountable for
• A report or presentation you delivered to leadership
• Writing samples

Denninger’s Employees Enjoy

• 20% staff discount across all locations
• 50% staff discount from Bistro items while on shift
• Perks Program (Monthly Super Staff Discounts, GoodLife Discount, Perkopolis, and more)
• Health, vision, and dental benefits after 6 months of employment
• Employee Assistance Program
• Access to 24/7 virtual health care
• Deferred Profit Sharing Plan (DPSP)

Requirements

• Ability to meet the physical essential job functions of the role, including but not limited to sitting, standing, and walking for extended periods, repeated lifting from floor to shoulder level, and sustained manual dexterity.

Denninger’s is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. Accommodations are available on request throughout the recruitment process.

R. Denninger Limited utilizes AI in the preliminary screening of all applicants submitted through our careers portal to determine their base eligibility. All further review is completed by a member of the hiring team.