The food industry does not lack awareness when it comes to training challenges. Ask almost anyone inside a manufacturing operation and the same issues surface quickly: limited time, inconsistent retention, language barriers, stretched supervisors, and a fragile food safety culture. Temporary and seasonal workers often sit at the center of that conversation, framed as both essential and risky.
Industry surveys, webinars and guidance documents reinforce the same conclusions: training is rushed, errors cluster around sanitation and changeovers, and food safety culture weakens under pressure. These incidents are frequently attributed to “human error,” but what is less often examined is why these problems persist — and how expensive the status quo has become.
I’ve worked with many companies where training programs technically met requirements. Metrics appeared acceptable, and audits were passed with flying colors. Yet the same failures surfaced again and again: mislabeled products during line and shift changes, sanitation errors, formulation and process oversights, and food defense vulnerabilities.
Each event carries obvious costs — scrap, rework, overtime, investigations, corrective actions, and recalls. But the larger expense is indirect and cumulative: slowed production, disengaged teams, rising turnover, and leadership time diverted from improvement work to managing preventable fallout.
Temporary workers don’t create these failures. They expose the conditions of the system they entered.
In many plants, new faces may appear on the floor with little shared context. Supervisors may not know who is arriving or why. Line leads absorb additional responsibility without notice. New or temporary employees are sent into production without receiving critical training. From a food defense standpoint alone, fragmented communication and inconsistent training become vulnerabilities, introducing unfamiliar personnel and unclear access norms into sensitive environments.
From a food safety culture standpoint, it’s even worse.
Culture is not what’s written in a policy or posted on a wall. It’s what people observe and internalize under pressure. When orientation is rushed, expectations are implicit, and accountability is situational, workers, especially temporary ones, quickly learn what truly matters: speed over caution, silence over escalation, and getting through the shift without conflict.
These are not personal failures. They are predictable human responses to system design.
Industry guidance often focuses on downstream controls including skills assessments, performance monitoring, and incentives. What is rarely assessed is whether workers understand how food safety culture actually functions in a facility — when to stop the line, who owns a decision during a changeover, how consistently rules are enforced, and whether speaking up is genuinely supported when production is tight. These realities are rarely taught. They are absorbed socially, often within the first few shifts.
After onboarding, organizations move quickly to monitoring and motivation such as daily check-ins, weekly metrics, and performance recognition programs. Food is frequently used as a common incentive — pizza for a strong week, tacos for hitting a target.
The intent is positive and the impact is overstated. If a preferred parking spot or a pizza party could solve the problem, we wouldn’t still be having this conversation.
When food safety culture is reinforced primarily through rewards and corrections rather than shared responsibility and clarity, it becomes transactional. Engagement fluctuates. Retention suffers. Leadership spends more time correcting behavior than leading systems. Turnover remains high, driving additional hiring, training, agency fees, and overtime. Those costs are compounded when the workforce most relied upon is also the most socially and economically vulnerable, especially in moments when external instability follows workers onto the floor.
The financial impact of this gap is significant, even if it’s rarely labeled as such. Companies pay for it in inefficiency, attrition, corrective actions, lost capacity, and leadership bandwidth consumed by damage control. These costs are diffuse, which makes them easy to overlook until they compound.
This is where the industry’s approach consistently starts too late. No refresher training can fully undo first impressions formed under pressure, and that pressure begins the moment a worker takes their first steps onto the production floor.
When companies intervene earlier, the results change.
Organizations that deliberately orient people before “rule-based” training begins — by clearly naming expectations, accountability, and shared responsibility — create more stable food safety and compliance cultures. Temporary and permanent workers operate within the same system instead of parallel ones. Management spends less time untangling misunderstandings. Compliance stabilizes faster. Food defense expectations become consistent rather than situational.
Training sticks because it lands in context, not chaos. Temporary workers don’t increase risk because they care less. They increase visibility into systems that were never designed to orient humans effectively in the first place.
The food industry already recognizes its training challenges. The data confirms them, and the anecdotes repeat them. What is now needed is the willingness to treat food safety culture as a system condition, and to start building it sooner.
Because the most expensive training strategy is the one that silently requires people to adapt to broken systems instead of fixing the systems you are placing them in.
About the author: Azure Edwards, M.S., is a food safety professional and consultant with nearly two decades of experience across USDA and FDA regulated food manufacturing. She is the founder of Pacific Blue Horizon Group, where her work focuses on food safety culture, operational systems, and human behavior — particularly how workforce dynamics and system design contribute to preventable risk and recurring failure despite technical compliance.