Food factories' hiring problem has shifted from line workers to engineers

For years, the food industry's hiring problem was a counting problem. Production lines, warehouses and supply chains needed more people than showed up, and manufacturers filled the gap with temporary labour and bigger recruiting budgets.

Dame Fiona Kendrick, a board member at Skills England and former chair and CEO of Nestlé UK & Ireland, says the problem is most acute in manufacturing, engineering, production and supply chain roles, where demand for skilled workers keeps running ahead of supply. "These shortages are no longer simply a workforce challenge," she told FoodNavigator. "They're constraining growth and investment, technology adoption and affecting manufacturers' ability to expand and compete internationally."

That changes the question a plant operations leader has to answer. Finding enough hands is still hard, but it is no longer the only staffing risk. The scarcer resource is the engineer, the maintenance technician, the food scientist and the data specialist.

Canada's study flips the hiring order

Food Processing Skills Canada (FPSC) put a number on the problem in a report covered by PeopleNX on Sept. 30. According to the report, Canadian food and beverage manufacturers must bring on 173,000 new workers by 2034 for the country to grow food production and shore up food security. FPSC found that the industry has to add jobs just to keep growing at its current rate, and that the kinds of workers it needs are shifting.

The ranking is the real news in this report. FPSC told PeopleNX that in every earlier study it had run, labourers came out as the top hiring need, and this was the first time they did not. Technical roles now rank above general labour in the findings of a sector skills council that has followed this workforce across several studies. That gives Kendrick's warning a second, independent data point from another country.

The national numbers point in the same direction. Staffing firm Spectraforce, in an August guide for food manufacturers, cited Bureau of Labor Statistics figures showing that U.S. food and beverage manufacturing employment climbed from about 1.7 million jobs in 2014 to 2.1 million in 2024. The same figures forecast that the total will pass 2.2 million by 2034. That works out to roughly 400,000 jobs gained over the past ten years, compared with a projected increase of 100,000-plus over the next ten. Taken together with the FPSC ranking, the data suggest that the bigger issue for the coming decade is the workforce's mix of skills rather than its headcount.

Competing with aerospace for a maintenance tech

Kendrick names engineers, maintenance technicians and production operatives among the hardest positions to fill. The first two put food plants into a market they do not control. Engineering skills are in demand across almost every industrial sector, she notes, so food and drink manufacturers compete with aerospace, automotive and advanced manufacturing, all of which want many of the same skills and can often pay higher salaries.

Spectraforce's guide sets out what that maintenance role actually covers. Automated fillers, conveyors, ovens, refrigeration units, pumps, sensors and packaging equipment set the pace of production, and when they fail, production stops. Plants need people who can diagnose and repair that equipment to safety and sanitary standards.

Spectraforce expects these maintenance roles to stay hard to fill. The BLS projects 13% employment growth between 2024 and 2034 for industrial machinery mechanics, maintenance workers and millwrights, with about 54,200 openings expected annually. Those projections span the occupation across all industries, and that is what Kendrick's point looks like in practice: the maintenance tech a food plant wants is being recruited from the same pool the car plant draws on.

The firm's screening list reads like a map of where food plants overlap with other heavy industries, plus a few skills specific to food:

• Maintenance work, both preventive and predictive
• Troubleshooting of mechanical and electrical faults
• PLCs (programmable logic controllers)
• Pneumatic and hydraulic systems
• Ammonia or refrigeration systems
• Lockout/tagout procedures
• CMMS (computerized maintenance management systems)
• Repair and hygienic design of equipment

According to Spectraforce, maintenance staff also need a working knowledge of tool control, lubricants and replacement parts, along with what is at stake when equipment is not cleaned to food safety standards. Here the overlap with aerospace and automotive stops. A technician with strong PLC and hydraulics skills from another industry might still require food-specific training before handling equipment that contacts product, and that shrinks a pool that is already fought over.

Quality roles bring the regulator into the interview

The shortage of technical skills reaches beyond the maintenance shop. Food plants must meet detailed rules set by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration, and the FDA's Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) stresses moving away from crisis management and toward prevention. In Spectraforce's guide, quality assurance technicians and food safety specialists are described as the people who inspect materials, verify cleaning, watch control points and maintain the records that audits and investigations rely on.

The expected knowledge base is specific: HACCP, GMP, FSMA, allergen control and environmental monitoring, plus Safe Quality Food or the British Retail Consortium Global Standard. For certain senior food safety positions, experience as a Preventive Controls Qualified Individual is relevant, and the guide points to FDA guidance that the individual behind a facility's food safety plan must have training or food safety experience.

The cost of getting these hires wrong is operational, not administrative. Spectraforce warns that vacancies in maintenance, quality or production leadership can disrupt an entire facility, and that poor hiring can lead to costly equipment repairs and high employee turnover. Candidates may also need to work nights, weekends or seasonal shifts in uncomfortable environments, one more variable in a contest where rival sectors can often pay more.

Retirements take the know-how with them

Demographics sharpen the squeeze. Kendrick said more than a third of the sector's workers are 50 or older, a significant succession challenge as experienced staff approach retirement. PeopleNX's coverage of the FPSC report flags the same combination in Canada: skills shortages, perception challenges and an aging workforce.

The concern goes beyond open requisitions. As older employees leave, companies risk losing decades of technical and manufacturing expertise along with operational knowledge. Many manufacturers are therefore focusing on developing talent internally rather than relying on a constrained external labour market.

Kendrick still lists production operatives among the hardest roles to fill. Spectraforce's guidance offers one practical opening: for production roles, food experience is a plus but should not be mandatory, and experience in pharmaceuticals, consumer goods or other regulated production can also be beneficial. Paired with internal development, a wider entry point could give plants a larger base of operators to grow into the technical roles that retirements will vacate.

AI raises the bar again

As investment in AI, robotics and advanced manufacturing speeds up, demand rises for workers with robotics, data and problem-solving skills. The futurists who expect the most from that technology still put people in the loop.

Speaking to ConfectioneryNews about the industry in 2036, food futurist Mike Lee said he expects AI to increasingly manage quality control, manufacturing optimisation and supply chain forecasting. Tony Hunter went further, suggesting AI-powered systems could turn 18-month innovation cycles into weeks. Both believe humans will remain essential. If Lee's forecast holds, it would matter for the roles above: AI-managed quality control still runs on equipment someone has to maintain and produces data someone has to interpret.

Kendrick's warning that shortages are already constraining technology adoption is the operating lesson here. For any manufacturer budgeting for robotics or AI-driven quality control, the hiring and training plan for maintenance, engineering and data roles belongs in the same document as the equipment.