Food and beverage manufacturing is preparing for significant workforce growth. The sector is projected to add roughly 130,000 jobs by 2034, more than any other manufacturing sector. That growth is encouraging, but it arrives with a harder problem underneath it.
Nearly one in four U.S. food manufacturing employees is already 55 or older, meaning manufacturers must add people as experienced workers approach retirement, skilled labor remains difficult to find and frontline jobs become more technically demanding. Filling open positions matters, but headcount alone will not close the industry's growing expertise gap.
To keep up, manufacturers have to do two things at once: help new employees become effective faster and retain the knowledge their most experienced operators have spent decades building.
Experience Is Leaving Faster Than It Can Be Replaced
Many of the most valuable lessons inside a plant are not stored in a manual. They live with the operators, technicians and supervisors who know how a line behaves, which early warning signs precede a breakdown and when a small deviation could become a quality or safety problem.
This institutional knowledge is usually shared informally, during a shift handoff, while troubleshooting equipment or in a quick conversation between an experienced operator and a newer employee. It could be that veteran operator pointing out that slight change in a machine’s sound is often the first sign of a developing problem. That lesson may only take seconds to share, but it could help a newer employee catch an issue before the line stops.
When knowledge like this is not captured, it leaves with the person when they retire, change roles or walk out the door.
Manufacturers cannot preserve every lesson before an experienced worker leaves. They can, however, make knowledge capture part of daily work rather than treating it as a separate documentation project. And the knowledge new hires need most is exactly the knowledge that is walking out the door.
The mechanism that moves it from one to the other is frontline communication.
Faster Onboarding Requires Access to Real-World Knowledge
Traditional onboarding gives employees the essentials: safety, quality standards and operating procedures. What it cannot recreate is the context employees gain from encountering actual production problems.
A new operator may know the correct process on paper but still need help recognizing an abnormal sound, understanding why a line repeatedly slows during a certain product run or deciding which issue to escalate first. That judgment develops through experience and manufacturers cannot always afford to wait months or years for employees to acquire it on their own.
New employees need a faster way to learn from what is already happening around them. Real-time communication helps by connecting them with experienced colleagues the moment a question or issue comes up.
Transcription can keep that learning on the floor even after the moment has passed. Consider an unplanned line stop. When the communication around the event is captured, a team can reconstruct exactly what happened between the moment the line went down and the moment it resumed: who was called, in what order, how long passed between each message and where the minutes were actually lost. Reviewing that sequence turns a single disruptive event into a repeatable lesson and a newer operator can see how an experienced crew diagnosed and cleared the problem instead of starting from zero the next time a similar fault occurs.
A technician can explain a repair while completing it. A supervisor can give immediate context for a production change. An operator can flag an unusual condition before the details are forgotten. These exchanges already happen in plants every day. The opportunity is to make them easier to access and reuse.
Frontline Conversations Can Become Operational Knowledge
Most people working on a production floor cannot stop to type a detailed report. Their hands are occupied, they are wearing gloves or they are moving between equipment and work areas. Voice is –and always has been – the most practical way to capture information at the point of work. When appropriate frontline conversations are transcribed and organized, information that would otherwise disappear becomes searchable operational knowledge.
At one facility, leaders analyzed routine radio chatter and identified a progressing, systemic failure in a water system. Because the communication data showed the problem worsening week over week, the plant manager had the concrete evidence to justify a preventative maintenance investment and replace the pump before it failed. About 83% of industrial decision makers estimated that unplanned downtime costs at least $10,000 per hour, so catching a failure before it happens is not a small win.
By making floor communications visible and routing specific issues to the right leaders, that same plant cut its average issue-resolution time by 50%.
With that kind of record, a team can review how employees handled a recurring equipment fault, what happened during a difficult changeover or where confusion emerged during a shift handoff and feed it back into training, work instructions and future troubleshooting.
The goal is not to record communication for its own sake. It is to surface the knowledge already contained in daily operations, so the next employee facing the same problem does not start from zero. This matters more as AI enters the plant. AI is only as useful as the information available to it and much of the real operational context lives in frontline conversations, not formal documentation. Capturing it builds a more accurate record of how work actually happens, not only how the process was designed to happen. Finally, institutional knowledge can enter workflows – even as workers come and go.
Communication Must Be Treated as Infrastructure
As food and beverage manufacturers expand their workforces, communication cannot be treated as just a way for employees to reach one another. It has to become part of the organization's infrastructure for onboarding, knowledge transfer and continuous improvement.
That means asking whether information can actually move across shifts, departments, languages and experience levels. It means making it easy for frontline employees to ask for help and to contribute what they know. And it means making sure important lessons do not stay trapped in a single conversation or with a single person.
The food and beverage workforce is growing. Whether it becomes smarter, safer and more efficient will depend on how well manufacturers capture, communicate and apply the knowledge already on their floors.
Ryan Zepp is the business development director of food & beverage at Relay.
