Simon Dixon Email & Phone Number

Auckland, Nz

Auckland, Auckland, Nz

Dad's Pies is a specialist pie and ready food business that was acquired by Allied British Foods at the end of 2021. As the lead for the Pie and Savoury portfolio at George Weston Foods Baking NZ, was moved into a dual role to lead the marketing and innovation for George Weston Foods whole pie portfolio from April 2022.

North Ryde, Nsw, Au

George Weston Foods Limited is one of Australia and New Zealand's largest food manufacturers employing over 6,500 people across 60 sites. GWF is a wholly owned subsidiary of Associated British Foods plc (ABF) and is a diversified international group with operations across sugar, agriculture, retail, grocery and ingredients, employing over 106,000 people in 47 countries. George Weston Foods baking division brands in NZ include, Tip Top Bakery, Golden, Ploughman’s Bakery, Burgen, Bazaar and Big Ben pies.

North Ryde, Nsw, Au

Prior to taking the posting as the senior brand manager for pies and snacking. My previous roles with George Weston Foods had been working on segment specific brands within the bread category. I've had the privilege of working on several brands including, Tip Top Bakery Supersoft, Tip Top Bakery Goodness Grains, Ploughmans Bakery, Bazaar, Two Hands and Gold Max. George Weston Food's only pie brand is Big Ben. Big Ben is a truly iconic New Zealand brand with exceptional spontaneous brand awareness. Big Ben has been making pies since the 1960's and has been the pie of choice to feed countless generations of kiwis. Working on the pie business and being the brand steward of Big Ben has allowed me to broaden and develop my strategic and category skills. Specifically the skills to do with, segmentation development, brand range architecture, product development, joint business planning, price architecture, promotional effectiveness and has really allowed me to fine tune my innovation and product development skills. During my time in this role I have also been able to develop and hone my leadership skills, in particular the skills around, collaboration, empowerment and initiative. Leading the pie business from a marketing perspective has given me rich insight into organisational culture and how to influence it.

North Ryde, Nsw, Au

In this role I was a key brand manager in the bread category looking primarily after the Ploughmans Bakery brand. I also looked after a specialty bread brand known as Bazaar as well as an artisan styled bread brand in Two Hands. As a brand manager with George Weston Foods I was fortunate enough to work in an end to end brand management capacity. This included many brand marketing tasks; consumer need and insight development, brand strategy development and planning, advertising and promotional budget planning, product development and management - including full P&L management, packaging direction and development, media and creative advertising development and implementation, development of social media strategy and tactics and post analysis of all projects and activities. In my time as a brand manager I gained extensive experience managing complex projects and followed robust project management processes including, timeline and task development, risk management and mitigation and stakeholder management. Through out my time in this role i also worked with the sales team to organise multiple national roadshows to engage the merchandise and wider field force.

North Ryde, Nsw, Au

As an assistant brand manager with George Weston Foods I was given much of the responsibility mentioned above in the brand manager skill set above. However, as an assistant brand manager I gained two unique experiences. In this role I worked on several multimedia advertising campaigns. This included working on a wide variety of media including, TV, magazine, online, website development and implementation. The campaigns I worked on were summer support campaigns for Bazaar and the relaunch campaign to support the relaunch of Ploughmans as Ploughmans Bakery.During my time in this role I was also given the opportunity to build from inception to full implementation my first brand. Two Hands was built to try and meet a gap in the premium/luxury end of the bread market.

North Ryde, Nsw, Au

Auckland, Auckland, Nz

Working as a Tower Host was a customer service lead role. The primary purpose was to assist guests by answering their questions and assisting them with finding other attractions that they wanted. As a team manager the role was focused on ensuring key tasks in the tower and retail stores got done. In this role i was able to really develop my people leadership skills, specifically the skills empowerment and initiative. While i worked in this role i also got exposure to the fundamentals of retailing. These fundamentals included, visual merchandising, merchandise strategies and stock management.

Auckland, Auckland, Nz

Orbit is one of the biggest and busiest à la carte restaurants in New Zealand. Situated at the top of the Sky Tower it is a restaurant that attracts all kinds of patrons. Being one of the busiest restaurants in New Zealand, it proved to be the perfect environment to develop and refine many time management and prioritisation skills while also learning how to interact with customers and deal with their requests and complaints.

When i worked at Toto it was one of the premier restaurants of Auckland. Known of it's exemplary service and progressive yet traditional menu's. It was in this role that i honed my waiting and bar skills and was allowed to dabble in the kitchen as an apprentice chef. It was at Toto that was afforded the opportunity to learn the art of food and wine matching and really developed my sommelier skills. As Toto has two major function centre's beneath the restaurant i also was able to develop and hone my event management skills.

Us

This was my first role in the Quick Service Restaurant business. I started out the role as a crew member. As a crew member the main role was to fill customers orders and manage the cash register. After i managed to prove myself to the owner i was quickly granted further responsibility and was elevated to become a store manager part time. This key changes were that i was given responsibility to manage opening and closing of the store as well as opening and closing the cash register. I left this role in search of a role in the restaurant trade as i had decided that i wanted a career in hospitality.

Master’S Degree, Marketing

Finance For Non-Finance

Project Management

Bachelor’S Degree, Marketing & Advertising

Associate’S Degree, Hospitality Operations