Last year, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) published a joint study with Deloitte and found that 3.8 million jobs may need to be filled within the next decade. Even with a slow start to 2025, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported 502,000 unfilled positions at U.S. manufacturing plants in January 2025.

These numbers reveal workforce challenges for food manufacturers, which include training, retention and implementing a permanent safety culture. With these challenges, food manufacturers are implementing continuous improvement training, adhering to safety standards and adopting digital tools to help retain workers.

“Food producers have to prioritize personnel and operator safety even more than ever,” says Todd Gilliam, industry leader, hybrid industries, Rockwell Automation. “Workers are inherently more attracted to environments they consider to be safe and resonate more — and stay longer — with potential employers that have adopted a stronger safety culture.”

A study by Price Waterhouse Cooper (PwC) and the Manufacturing Institute recently revealed that 86% of manufacturing executives named safety as the most important factor for creating a positive workplace experience.

One approach to improve safety is continuous training via online and digital tools. “E-learning increases retention rates from approximately 8-10% to almost 60%,” says Michael Ojdana, chief learning officer at Vector Solutions in a December 2024 webinar. “About 85% of every dollar spent on classroom training is spent delivering it, and you likely have to continue doing that training and delivering it over and over.”

Vector Solutions offers learning management systems to tackle retention challenges, and it advocates microlearning, team meetings, toolbox talks, just-in-time training and nudge training. “In a study by Stanford and MIT, spacing out learning can increase learning and retention by about 88%,” Ojdana adds. “When we space learning out over time, behavior changes are increasingly more impactful.”

“Safety training is always evolving due to so many aspects that come into play when talking about operator safety,” adds Shawn Kentch, regional service manager at Handtmann Inc. “Redundancy and safety are the highest priorities with our machines.”

Handtmann Inc. is an OEM supplier to the food processing industry — filling, forming and process line solutions for meat, bakery, dairy and pet food. “Operators in the past would bypass a safety switch, but due to shift changes, employee turnover or promotions, the switch never gets rectified. Nobody would ever go back and repair that safety,” Kentch says. “When one safety switch is open with our equipment, it kills the drive’s power and ensures uniformity.”

“It’s always important to maintain a strong emphasis on tasks that present an opportunity for loss of control related to high-hazard energy, such as fall protection, lockout/tagout and confined spaces,” notes Chris England, VP of safety at Fortrex Solutions.

Moreover, food producers may focus more on machine builders and safety standards as the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) retreats. In March, the USDA and the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) division extended waivers to allow pork and poultry facilities to maintain higher line speeds.

For now, a bigger share of safety best practices is being thrust upon the end users and the industry. As a result, companies are looking to venerable standards bodies, such as the International Society of Automation (ISA), for guidance on alarm management and ways to leverage modern technology. Alarm management varies by industry, but the ISA 18.2 standard establishes alarm systems to alert operators to potentially hazardous situations, such as temperature deviations, pressure abnormalities or equipment malfunctions.

The ISA 18.2 standard demands action, but operators are also familiar with alarm flooding — runaway alarm notifications on the plant floor. Alarm flooding can inflict inefficiencies or blind spots due to an overwhelming number of instrument deviations. E Tech Group, a system integrator, developed a customized alarm analytics solution using Rockwell Automation’s Factory Talk DataMosaix. The technology provides insights similar to PlantPax’s Analytics alarm manager, such as dashboards, nuisance triggers and operational trends, but it avoids investing in new control architecture for a plant. According to a recent press release, the company is creating its own “early adopter” experience for clients not yet prepared to upgrade their control platforms.

Food Technician Certification Program Delivers Safety

Since COVID-19, food processors have turned to outside organizations and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to bolster safety training and skills. In 2019, the Food Production Solutions Association (FPSA) created the industry’s first national Food Industry Technician (FIT) certification program for maintenance technicians that emphasized plant floor applications and regulations found in OSHA safety standards.

“As our students advance to FIT training, we broaden their understanding of the OSHA standards by discussing the safety required in most aspects of processing plant operations,” says David Seckman, executive director of the Food Industry Technician Development Program. FIT works with Lincoln College of Technology — also known as Lincoln Tech — for the actual hands-on education.

Food industry leaders helped shape the curriculum. “At the inception of the training program, we brought in more than two dozen executives from different companies and numerous subject matter experts in engineering and maintenance,” says Bob Greaney, quality assurance and curriculum advisor for the FIT program in 2024.

Seckman also reports that quality improvement meetings and lockout/tagout (LOTO) in a multi-shift operation are examples of safety that require frequent training and retraining for operators and technicians.

Below are some of the safety components of the FIT program:

• Students are assigned their own lock/key/tags and are trained to tag out energized power on the 40+ machines residing in the program laboratory.
• Energized power sources include electricity, hydraulics and pneumatics in the environment. Students use their multi-meter to perform a live-dead-live step after each LOTO.
• Students require training in the different types of personal protective equipment (PPE), and a safety officer is assigned to educate and audit adherence to LOTO, PPE and machine guarding during laboratory exercises.
• Students learn about different types of valves, fittings, hydraulics, pneumatics, automation, sensors, electrical and pumps.

“FIT employers come to our hiring events because we bring out the best in professionalism and technical education with our graduates,” Greaney says. “Our students are already familiar with important safety concepts that speed up onboarding.”

FIT students also learn about situational awareness, such as checking surroundings, evaluating unsafe activity and reinforcing the use of PPE, including hearing protection and proper gloves.

Fortrex, a supplier of sanitation services and chemical products, also sees greater emphasis on PPE use. “Since many facilities require physically demanding job tasks, the safety awareness topics emphasized have focused on the proper use of PPE and hazard recognition — chemical handling, machine guarding, and identifying slip, trip and fall hazards.”

“We also train students about the dangers of Arc flashes,” Greaney adds. “Additionally, our students are provided with apparel appropriate for the dangers referenced in NFPA 70-E regulatory compliance literature, which is found in the various higher-voltage equipment panels utilized in food processing environments.”

Young workforces also prefer digital tools, and companies are responding. “In the areas of training, data, tools and processes, we have seen increased investments in digital technologies to assist with knowledge retention and safety/skills training,” Gilliam notes.

“Mobile solutions support the workforce with their daily tasks, and all the information is available on the machine,” adds Lucie Dahuron, global marketing cross segment leader at Schneider Electric. “The software guides the maintenance technician through their tasks and reduces onboarding of new employees.”