The food and beverage manufacturing arena integrates safety, quality, speed, and cost variables. Maintenance, quality, or production leadership vacancies can disrupt an entire facility’s operations, while suboptimal hiring can lead to costly equipment repairs and high employee turnover due to contamination concerns.
The industry is expanding. U.S. food and beverage manufacturing jobs increased from about 1.7 million in 2014 to 2.1 million in 2024 and are predicted to surpass 2.2 million by 2034, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Increased demand means employers must take a more refined approach to food manufacturing staffing, with roles focused on task-driven skills, compliance, and a reliable, stable workforce.
Why Hiring in Food and Beverage Manufacturing Is Different
Food manufacturing is a unique production environment. Employees may work with perishable products, allergens, and a variety of (potentially dangerous) automated machinery. Strict production schedules, if not met, can impact employee safety and health.
Facilities also operate under detailed requirements from agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The FDA’s Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) emphasizes the shift from crisis management to prevention and securing food safety.
This complicates recruitment. Employers need to determine if candidates can complete their tasks and reliably follow documented processes. Additionally, candidates may need to work nights, weekends, and/or seasonal shifts in uncomfortable environments.
Key Roles Food and Beverage Manufacturers Need to Fill
Production Operators and Line Workers
Production team members are responsible for weighing and measuring ingredients, operating machinery, and packing finished products. They also need to inspect the product and log production records. Their roles are the most important in determining throughput and product quality.
Employers should look for candidates who demonstrate:
- Experience following standard operating procedures
- Basic equipment and control-panel knowledge
- Attention to weights, temperatures, timing, and product appearance
- Understanding of hygiene and personal protective equipment
- Willingness to report defects instead of ignoring them
- Reliability across the required shift schedule
Experience in food and beverage production is a plus but shouldn’t be mandatory. Experience in pharmaceuticals, consumer goods, or regulated production can also be beneficial.
Quality Assurance and Food Safety Professionals
Quality assurance technicians and food safety specialists help protect the consumer and the company. They inspect materials, confirm cleaning, monitor control points, and take notes for investigations and audits.
They should also know HACCP, GMP, FSMA, allergen control, and environmental monitoring, as well as Safe Quality Food or the British Retail Consortium Global Standard.
Employers should determine what actions candidates performed in past jobs. Being part of an audit is not the same as leading one. Documenting results and analyzing data to determine what actions need to be taken, they are not the same.
Experience as a Preventive Controls Qualified Individual is relevant to certain senior food safety positions. According to the FDA, for a food safety plan to be written for a facility, or to be written and not reviewed by a qualified person, the individual must have training or food safety experience.
Maintenance Technicians and Reliability Engineers
Automated fillers, conveyors, ovens, refrigeration units, pumps, sensors, and packaging equipment affect production flow. When this equipment fails, production is halted. Manufacturers need personnel to effectively diagnose and repair equipment in a manner that fails to meet safety and sanitary standards.
Challenges in recruitment are likely to persist. Employment of industrial machinery mechanics, maintenance workers, and millwrights is projected to grow by 13% between 2024 and 2034. Around 54,200 openings are expected each year.
Recruiters should assess experience in areas such as:
- Preventive and predictive maintenance
- Electrical and mechanical troubleshooting
- Programmable logic controllers
- Hydraulics and pneumatics
- Refrigeration or ammonia systems
- Lockout/tagout procedures
- Computerized maintenance management systems
- Hygienic equipment design and repair
Maintenance staff must also be aware of tool control, lubricants and replacement parts, and the consequences of not cleaning equipment to food safety standards.
Production Supervisors and Plant Managers
Frontline leaders affect safety outcomes, employee turnover, product quality, and production output for the day. Effective supervisors do not just meet production goals. They organize work, train employees, address issues, set and uphold standards, and communicate with work groups in other areas.
Employers should prioritize candidates who can balance performance with accountability. A leader who increases speed by overlooking safety or quality requirements creates greater costs later.
Behavioral interview questions are useful for these roles. Ask candidates to explain how they handled an understaffed shift, repeated quality failures, poor attendance, or conflict between maintenance and production. When addressing these issues, candidates often provide better, more specific insights than general leadership guidance.
Supply Chain and Planning Professionals
The food and beverage supply chain must consider ingredient availability, transportation delays, promotional spikes, retailer demand, storage capacity, and shelf life. Demand Planners, Buyers, and Warehouse Sales Staff help eliminate surplus waste and stock shortages.
During recruitment, employers should focus on the candidate’s ability to make quick decisions in the best interests of the company, as well as their knowledge of demand planning, cold-chain logistics, inventory turnover, and inventory tracking.
What Employers Should Prioritize During Recruitment
- Food Safety Awareness at Every Level
It is a common misperception that food safety is limited to quality. Production staff, maintenance staff, and warehouse staff can also introduce food safety risks, as can food and beverage supervisors.
As per FDA guidelines, employees engaged at any stage of food production or storage must possess the requisite formal academic education, work experience, or training. Additionally, they must be given general education on the significance of hygiene in food production or storage and the relevant food safety principles.
During interviews, ask candidates how they would respond to damaged packaging, an unrecorded temperature, a possible allergen mix-up, or a broken machine component.
- Safety Behavior, Not Just Safety Claims
Manufacturing exposes employees to many potential hazards. In 2023, the BLS attributed 355,800 injuries and illnesses to the manufacturing sector.
Before hiring, employers must determine whether a potential employee understands the job’s safety considerations. Asking potential employees about safe behaviors regarding machine guarding, chemical signage, PPE, near-miss reporting, and lockout/tagout can give the employer insight into that employee’s safe behaviors.
- Technical Skills That Match the Facility
Job titles are often misleading. A bakery machine operator may have skills and experience that are completely different from a beverage bottling or meat processing machine operator.
Hiring managers must articulate the skills, experience, and education a potential employee must have to perform the job. They must draw the line between the must-haves and the areas that a potential employee can be trained in once hired. These skills and experience can then be defined in a more realistic job description.
- Reliability and Shift Fit
Even if a candidate has strong experience, they may not be a good fit if they cannot meet the job requirements, including the schedule, commute, physical demands, and work environment. Recruiters must provide candidates with the job requirements before making a job offer.
Job descriptions must state the exact job requirements, including the need for overnight, weekend, or holiday shifts, heavy lifting, or exposure to cold work environments. This may narrow down the list of potential candidates. But it is more likely to increase job acceptance and, therefore, job retention.
Employers must not label absenteeism as an attendance-related issue. There are numerous attendance-related obstacles, such as an unpredictable work schedule, insufficient transportation, poor employee onboarding, and a lack of managerial supervision.
- Communication and Problem-Solving
Employees must articulate defects in a product, describe symptoms of a defect in a piece of equipment, and carry out tasks with precision. Supervisors must communicate and collaborate with the maintenance, quality control, warehouse, and planning teams.
Interview questions should focus on past behavior. Ask them to describe an instance where they have identified a defect in a process, pioneered an improvement, and/or voiced their disagreement with a behavior related to production.
Conclusion
The unique nature of recruiting employees within the food and beverage manufacturing industry can often seem complicated. The most effective workforce strategy incorporates clarity, precision, and preparation in all aspects of the workforce delivery process.
This includes clearly described workforce delivery and contracting requirements, structured, focused assessments, and honest, clear communication.
A specialized food production staffing partner, such as SPECTRAFORCE, offers flexible staffing solutions for contractual hires and long-term employees to ensure your operations are in check. With end-to-end workforce delivery support, we ensure all your critical roles do not remain vacant for too long.
