The Australian food and beverage manufacturing sector is facing significant workforce challenges: skilled labour shortages and a high turnover rate. One of the world’s largest certification and standards companies, Intertek SAI Global, says the technology-backed workforce training system, Intertek Alchemy, it is launching in Australia is a solution.
One of the major pain points for food and beverage manufacturers is labour shortages. Coupled with logistics issues, supply chain interruptions, and now compounded by rising interest rates and economic nervousness, it is not an industry for the faint hearted.
But it is a large and critically important one. The latest Australian Bureau of Statistics labour market figures show manufacturing is the sixth largest industry in the country, employs 870,700 people, and accounts for 6.3 per cent of the total workforce. The average age of someone working in the sector is 43, 28.3 per cent are female, and 83.5 per cent work full-time.
Food Product manufacturing is the largest sector in the industry, employing 194,000 people, 21.9 per cent of people working in manufacturing. Beverage and Tobacco employs 37,300, and Machinery and Equipment Manufacturing 121,800.
The ABS also projected employment growth of 2.7 per cent (23,100 people) for manufacturing in the five years to November 2026.
While recruiting employees presents one challenge, another pressing issue for an industry as strictly regulated as food and beverage, is training.
Ben Marshall is the commercial director APAC for Intertek SAI Global, and has been charged with the Australian roll-out of Intertek Alchemy, its technology-led workforce skills development solution.
“Our focus is on helping clients engage and retain their workforce, create safe and productive working environments, and maintain compliance.
“So often we see systems fall down in a food production facility because someone is away and no-one else is qualified to do their role, or people have not been trained at all in a certain area,” Marshall says.
He says training technology must be considered an essential tool for recruiting, educating, and advancing employees for the long-term.
Alchemy’s 2022 Global Food Safety Training Survey data was drawn from 2118 people at more than 3000 food production facilities globally (some answers represented multiple facilities managed by the respondent).
Since 2013, the company has surveyed the industry on its food safety training challenges and program characteristics. In each survey, the majority of respondents reported that, regardless of training efforts, they still had employees not following their food safety programs.
The question became, what are the minority of respondents who are achieving compliant employee behaviour doing differently.
What Alchemy found was three key factors can alleviate the “danger zone” of non-compliance and greater risk of food safety incidents.
- Tailoring training to specific job roles increases the likelihood from 22 per cent to 82 per cent that a frontline employee will halt production when necessary to prevent a food safety incident;
- highly motivated employees are two times more likely to consistently adhere to food safety protocols on the floor; and
- the five action items organisations can take to keep employees highly motivated and improve food safety outcomes. For example, 78 per cent of companies with a mature upskilling program have highly motivated employees, compared to 43 per cent for companies without an upskilling program.
"What we found was the substantial majority (86 per cent) of training in the sector is focused on “on-the-job training” (86 per cent) and/or “read and understand learning of standard operating procedures” (77 per cent). This leads to a lack of standardisation and a high risk of non-compliance in food safety requirements, which are business critical," Marshall said.
He explained that Alchemy's technology-led system means companies can adapt learning modules to their business and workforce.
“On an operational front, the uniformed training Alchemy offers expedites on-boarding, ensures knowledge retention, and provides better use of man hours so as not to disrupt production in an industry that often experiences regular employee turnover.
“we’re all used to traditional sit down or face-to-face – but it’s entirely malleable – it can be entirely remote or anywhere, it can be run virtually, it can be delivered how you best want to cascade a common message consistently across your workforce,” he said.
The system offers more than 100 training courses and tracks the learnings and training employees have done, meaning if someone is away, for example, a shift manager can refer to Alchemy and see who else has the necessary training completed, or who is partially through the program and could do the job with added assistance, rather than the process having to be stopped altogether.
It also offers the courses in a host of different languages.
Marshall said Alchemy’s research showed that Australia was primed for a tech-led skills provider, with local businesses almost twice as likely (34 per cent) to implement new training and technologies or delivery methods in the next year compared to global counterparts (17.5 per cent).
Marshall said it was a confluence of events putting Australia at that level – there’s very few training programs on offer, the current system is very binary and not engaging, the level of growth being experienced, the shortage of labour, and difficulty retaining them.
“We provide hundreds of industry-specific courses based on adult-learning best practices with multiple delivery options and automated documentation to keep facilities audit-ready.
“Australia has an incredibly strong food and beverage industry that contributes substantially to employment opportunities across the country, particularly in regional areas. With a robust training platform like Alchemy in place, it positions food manufacturing businesses for growth as they are supported by a skilled and competent workforce,” said Ben Marshall.
