For many food manufacturers, maintaining a skilled workforce can feel like a never-ending uphill battle. And, as a tidal wave of manufacturing workers hit retirement age, the industry will need to hire and retain 142,000 new workers by 2030, making the path ahead appear only steeper still.
But it does not have to be this way. By understanding where traditional talent management approaches are falling short, food manufacturers are finding innovative ways to adapt and forge a better path forward, building stable teams and reducing the constant drain of recruitment and retraining.
Here are five strategies that successful food manufacturers are using to transform their approach to talent management, making both recruitment and training more efficient and effective in 2025.
Partner with Workforce Development Organizations
As manufacturing evolves, so do the skills required for many manufacturing positions. Digital skills and soft skills—like critical thinking, problem solving, and creativity—are more important than ever as manufacturing processes become increasingly digitized and automated. To adapt, food manufacturers can build strategic partnerships with industry programs and organizations that can help accelerate workforce development.
For instance, Food Processing Skills Canada often partners with employers for work placement programs and can help manufacturers access funded training and upskilling opportunities for existing staff. Employer participation in FPSC programs like Succeeding at Work and the Student Work Placement Program can unlock grant funding for staff retraining and upskilling programs, along with wage subsidies to help you build a robust talent pipeline and help your team to adapt to the rapidly evolving nature of manufacturing work.
Build a Formal Retention Strategy
Most Canadian food manufacturers are small businesses (less than 100 employees). Many struggle to match the training, onboarding and compensation packages, and career advancement opportunities that workers can find at larger corporations and find themselves locked in a constant cycle of recruitment, training, and turnover.
Fortunately, there are still actions that smaller manufacturers can take to improve their recruitment efforts, and this begins with building a formal employee retention strategy. This strategy should be informed by market data along with insights from your existing workforce.
Conducting stay interviews can help you understand what your team values, giving you the ability to make highly desirable changes (like flexible shift patterns and schedules) that will boost employee retention rates.
Go Where the Talent Is: The “Nichification” of Job Boards
The days of relying solely on generic job boards are over. Food manufacturers looking to recruit effectively in 2025 should leverage the proliferation of niche recruitment platforms that align with their specific industry needs. Focusing recruitment efforts on specialized job boards can help you identify candidates with the exact skills and interests required for your roles, saving time and resources while improving hiring outcomes.
For instance, CFIN's Food Innovator Career Hub (FICH) is tailored specifically to employers and jobseekers in the food sector. Job posting can be shared directly via the discussion forum, and FICH also hosts a repository of the top food industry-specific job boards, including Careers in Food, which focuses exclusively on food and beverage manufacturing. While they may not have the massive pool of applicants you’ll find on the big job boards, these platforms are like fishing in a small pond packed with big fish. Instead of competing with unrelated industries, your postings stand out to the right audience. It’s the “quality over quantity” approach: your recruitment team can spend less time vetting a flood of applications and more time engaging with talent that fits your needs.
Bridging the Labour Gap With Augmented Reality-Enhanced Onboarding
One of the most exciting—and practical—emerging use cases for augmented reality (AR) technology is as a training and onboarding tool in complex manufacturing environments. By overlaying digital instructions onto real-world tasks, AR systems provide instant guidance that reduces errors and accelerates training completion. With one third of the manufacturing workforce over the age of 55, AR is poised to fill a critical gap in retaining the knowledge of skilled retirees and training the next generation of workers.
Solutions like DeepSight's autonomous AR training platform offer modular options that can scale with business needs to make them accessible for smaller operations, but the upfront investment of novel technologies often proves to be a major barrier. However, it is possible for manufacturers to find financial support through initiatives like the SCAP AgriInnovate Program, which helps food businesses adopt innovative, productivity-enhancing technologies like AR.
Make a Strategic Embrace of AI
AI-based solutions have incredible potential to supercharge all the recruiting and training solutions covered above. Wherever quality data exists in your training and recruitment processes, AI can be leveraged to drive substantial efficiency gains. One notable example would be the AI-based management of a workforce skill and abilities database to identify current or future talent gaps. Such a program would help optimize employee retention and internal recruiting efforts, while identifying current or future talent gaps that could be addressed through upskilling initiatives.
As unbridled enthusiasm over the potential of AI has been tempered, discussions of its benefits to food manufacturers have become more nuanced and realistic. Fully autonomous AI manufacturing facilities are not coming anytime soon, but its short-term impact will still be profoundly transformative. For every food manufacturer, large and small, now is the time to develop a well-considered AI adoption strategy.