Sustainability is becoming a watch word in the food and beverage sector. But there's a problem. There isn't enough green skills talent to fill the roles that are being created. To delve into the issue, Foods Connected gathered a group of leading ESG industry experts to analyse their insights on what’s driving the green skills crisis and what businesses can do to avoid it.
There’s a quiet skills crisis threatening to spill over into global food and drink space.
The International Labour Organisation conservatively projects the net creation of 18 million green jobs by 2030, with agri-food – responsible for a substantial proportion of land use, Greenhouse Gases and waste – accounting for a significant proportion of those roles.
From overseeing compliance with international reporting requirements to technical knowledge around carbon, packaging and waste, to communicating eco-credentials to consumers, the skills required are set to be expansive and multifaceted.
This is the current state of play across all industries
This "green" talent gap reflects simple inertia in some cases, but in others a major blocker is the struggle to find and recruit the right candidates. Once they have achieved this, businesses then face the challenge of identifying which skills are needed in what teams and accessing the existing external resources needed to navigate the transition.
So, what exactly will it take to close the green skills gap in food and drink?
To delve into the issue, Foods Connected chatted to leading ESG industry experts for their insights on what’s driving the green skills crisis – and what changes companies should make to ensure they don’t fall into the gap themselves.
Each industry faces its own challenges in meeting the burgeoning demands for green skills. But what particular barriers do those working in food and drink face?
To some extent, the current deficit in green skills within food and drink reflects the inevitable lag between the sudden onset of demand for sustainability-related specialisms and the time it takes to recruit or upskill teams.
Barry Larkham-Jones, Group Livestock Sustainability & Welfare Senior Manager at Hilton Foods says, “in agri-food, in particular, there absolutely is a gap and there’s a lot to be done.” But he stresses the importance of remembering that “there’s always a lag phase too, where we need people with knowledge and skills now, but we’re still acquiring and upskilling those people.”
He adds. “There’s maybe some conflict between the actual skills gap and willingness to change. For some of these organisations on their sustainability journey, perhaps some are left behind, where particularly within senior leadership, there might be a lack of willingness to change.”
But pressure is growing though from both a retail and regulatory perspective according to Paul Andrews, Head of Sustainability at Finnebrogue.
“Historically UK consumers and in turn, the UK retailers, have been the driving force in setting standards and expectations for a more sustainable food industry. Most of the retailers are mandating deforestation-free supply chains, more sustainable packaging, higher animal welfare standards, regenerative agriculture, lower carbon food production methods, and enhanced protections for global supply chain workers."
Now, regulators are adding these expectations to the rest of the value chain.
Andrews adds, “For years, the retailers have set sustainability targets and expectations which occurred, in most cases, without government legislating for it or legally imposing it. However, legislation is now catching up."
National and international regulations and legislation are now coming into force. The EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) on the import and export of forest risk commodities, the UK's packaging Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) reporting requirements (and related packaging fees), which aims to encourage producers to use more sustainable packaging materials, are both forcing industry-wide change. These are following in the footsteps of the CSRD reporting requirements in Europe, and on the horizon we have the UK Sustainability Reporting Standards (UK SRS) and a UK Forest Risk Commodity Regulation, neither of which have reached the implementation stage yet. In short, legislation is catching up with consumer expectations on sustainable food production.
This is because talent working in food and drink ESG require a complex blend of skills that can be hard for HR teams to articulate when seeking new hires. Andrews explains.
"I can't even really define what the perfect set of skills is. You need to have an understanding of the food industry, an understanding of sustainability and how carbon accounting works or a specialism in another technical area such as packaging specifications. But you also need to have a good knowledge of data and data manipulation and big data sets as well."
Fiona Roberts, ESG Compliance Manager at First Milk believes recruiting for green talent in food and drink often requires people who can blend strong commercial objectives with the demands of sustainability. “It can be challenging to try to match competing demands," she says.
“Fundamentally, the food and drink sector has to be commercially viable and so it can be a challenge finding people that can embed a more joined up approach between sustainability and those commercial demands."
She thinks this is particularly true for those companies that are being compelled to take the sustainability route because of reporting and compliance. "They may not necessarily fundamentally agree with sustainability as an approach, but they are finding themselves competing for talent with those more idealistic firms for which sustainability is front and centre, and very much part of their identity.”The skills required are set to be expansive and multifaceted. We expect to see job creation in:
There’s a growing appreciation that all of this needs to be addressed, believes Dee Halligan, Project Director at First Hand, a scheme that launched last year to offer place-based training and skills programmes to develop and embed green skills into food production and manufacturing.
She points to the roll-out of the Green Jobs Taskforce from 2020 as a real catalyst. Prior to that, she explains, it felt like there was no consensus or coherence. But since then she's felt a real change. "In the last two years things have hugely advanced and a lot of connections have been made with those seen as peripheral, or marginal voices, organisations like the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, SUSTAIN and The Soil Association, have now been brought to the centre.”
For its part, First Hand focuses on what are deemed "transformative" skills. Those include skills to communicate, collaborate, navigate uncertainty and complexity, imagine alternatives and realise them through innovation, she explains. It does this via anything from field trips and study tours through to communities of practise, networks and alliances.
“Our basic proposition is that the only way is open,” she says. “You have to be open to collaboration. And you can get there from literally opening your doors, whether that's to a local community stakeholder, group, your supply chain or more in-depth challenges.”
Though there’s no definitive list of the most sought-after green skills in food and drink – and indeed, some argue it’s very difficult to define what makes the ideal ESG candidate – there are some skills and areas of specialism that nearly all businesses should have on their radar right now.
Data analysis: It’s one thing to collate raw data from food and drink supply chains. It’s quite another to share it with regulators, investors and/or customers in an effective, accurate way.
Individuals that can interpret trends, patterns and progress in a sea of figures are often top of a recruiter’s list.
Responsible sourcing: On the cusp of regulation like EUDR, team members that can understand how products and commodities can comply with new responsible sourcing requirements are in high demand.
According to LinkedIn, last year’s fastest growing skill was sustainable procurement.
Communication: Though not exclusively a "green" skill, the integral role played by marketing and comms teams in relaying a company’s position on sustainability (without straying into dangerous greenwashing waters) has rarely been more apparent.
But comms is often a neglected part of the puzzle.
Future Food Movement was set up in 2021 as a UK membership community designed to support food and drink companies – and individuals – as they sought to upskill their teams to meet ESG demands.
For a monthly fee, the network offers its members, which include the likes of Tesco, Premier Foods and Cranswick, access to a self-guided e-learning platform and content library that spans topics such as climate literacy, net zero, regenerative food systems, circular economy, and climate-smart new product development (NPD) along with access to events, workshops and working groups.
Four years after its inception, the community now reaches 70% of UK grocery, says Louis Bedwell, Future Food Movement's Industry & Engagement Director. “Over the past year, participation has grown by more than 40%, with hundreds of industry leaders and teams engaging through our programmes.”
The organisation has expanded into specialist capability building offers as a result, such as leadership coaching for sustainability teams, commercial and ESG integration workshops, and peer learning cohorts tackling challenges like sustainable sourcing and product reformulation.
“More companies are embedding us directly into their operations to align sustainability targets with growth priorities and to connect functions that do not usually work together,” says Bedwell. “This has created a more coordinated, better equipped network able to move at the speed the market demands."
With regulatory pressure, climate volatility and shifting consumer values reshaping the food industry, the gap between sustainability ambition and day-to-day delivery is one of the biggest risks for F&B businesses. Future Food Movement helps close to close gap explains Bedwell.
"We bring together an unparalleled diversity of perspectives from across the entire food system into trusted, off record spaces where challenges can be shared and solved."
By 2027, Danone anticipates its European business alone will need to fill 2,500 ‘green’ positions and so, last year, it decided to take proactive steps to meeting that demand, by creating a new global training program titled DanSkills.
DanSkills is open to all Danone employees across the 55 countries where it operates, regardless of their current qualifications, job roles or age, with a focus on creating opportunities for them to pursue new or adjacent career paths that ESG.
The aim is to give each staff member the opportunity to pursue career opportunities in line with their professional aspirations, according to the company. In the process, DanSkills will strengthen Danone’s potential for innovation, creativity, shared efficiency, and performance.
Plans also include the creation of a dedicated management training centre at its historic Evian site. Even better for the organisations Danone collaborates with across its value chain, it also has plans to expand the programme to make it available to external partners in the future too.
For example, given the influential role that retailers play in determining what demands are placed on the rest of the value chain, Andrews would also like to see more of an emphasis on top-down communication of new ESG targets or goals that goes beyond Tier 1 suppliers.
“It's something we've asked for from the retailers. Several of our retailers have set targets, goals and clear requirements to Tier 1 suppliers to say the product has to be deforestation -free certified, for example. But we then speak to the next tier down in the supply chain and it’s like they’ve never heard of it before."
“We have some suppliers for which sustainability wasn't on their agenda at all, but they are a good supplier from every other aspect. They’re fairly priced, they do a good service, the product tastes good, but the sustainability wasn't there. So, we’ve actually run some workshops with them on how you become a more sustainable company. This is how you start reducing your carbon emissions and calculating your carbon emissions. That’s a lot of hats to wear so we have asked the retailers, can you help us?"
Roberts stresses this point. “They need to be aligned with what industry wants and needs, or even pre-empting what industry is going to want and need, rather than these courses playing catch-up with skills shortages.”
“It’s absolutely essential we have people that are passionate about the role,” he says. Not least because passionate, engaged people are more likely to throw themselves into asking questions and challenging the status quo.
Hilton Foods has actively been building its ‘green’ headcount in recent years, though technical skills, such as data analysis, but they also understand the importance of passion for a role.
“We're always looking at, what are the other things that we should be exploring? For example, one of the topics we’re just now discussing within our group is how do we use AI throughout our work streams? Is it for improving sustainability at a factory level? Is it improving sustainability within the wider supply chain, for example? We’re always trying to think of what's at the cutting edge and what is the next step.”
During the COVID-19 lockdown, Roberts herself had the opportunity to study for postgraduate qualification in sustainability at a university in Copenhagen as a way to further her knowledge basis, and says she continues to access training and skills workshops on the job to keep on top of what’s required in her role. “Even people in senior ESG positions have found themselves in a similar position because it's such a movable feast in terms of what the regulation asks.”
Training needs to be repeated at regular intervals to ensure skills are aligned with the latest understanding of a topic, and taking into account new emergent skills too, such as the way that AI is evolving how organisations manage sustainability.
Just as important is ensuring that any ESG skills programs aren’t made available exclusively to those working in CSR or sustainability roles. Every single role is likely to be impacted by ESG agendas going forward and so a baseline-level of training for all staff is key.
“There has been a sense in which it’s a topic in which the specialists over there will deal with it and so I don’t need to worry about it,” agrees Roberts. “And though yes, it’s true that more and more businesses do have ESG specialists, more and more people will have to have an awareness at least of how it’s driving activities across the business.”
“Sustainability touches on every aspect of the business from engineering through to technical through to NPD,” adds Andrews, who has worked with his sustainability colleagues to train up other departments in the business to ensure they’re making decisions through a lens of sustainability, even if it’s not their primary role.
With a raft of sustainability regulation coming down the pipeline that is set to place significant new burdens on food and drink supply chains – in addition to those already imposed by retailers and Tier 1 suppliers – now is not the time to kick the concept of a green skills gap into the long grass.
Though there’s no overnight fix, it’s imperative that senior business leaders are having conversations about where their own shortcomings lie, which missing skills are most urgent for their business and putting in place proactive strategies to address the deficit.
References: *Total Jobs Hiring Index.**Global Green Skills Report 2024, LinkedIn.***European Policy Centre. ****Kantar Survey.