By: Bruce Torien - Managing Director at BLU by Adcorp

South Africa’s agro-processing sector is gaining renewed national attention – and for good reason. It contributed an estimated 2.7% to GDP in 2023, employed more than 460,000 people across its various divisions in Q2:2024, and remains the largest sub-sector of manufacturing, with food-processing value-add outpacing overall manufacturing growth. 

In many ways, agro-processing is the engine room between farm and market. And, as the country works to strengthen food security, expand exports, and grow rural economies, the sector’s performance is becoming even more central to overall economic resilience.

But like many industries in transition, agro-processing is evolving faster than its traditional workforce structures. What was once a straightforward extension of agricultural labour is now a sophisticated, standards-driven environment defined by tightening food-safety requirements, increased automation, faster production cycles, and surging seasonal demands.

This evolution is reshaping the profile of people required in factories, mills, abattoirs, and packaging facilities across the country. It is less about creating entirely new roles, and more about developing deep, sector-specific experience driven by workers who understand its unique realities. With machinery, technologies, and processing techniques continuously advancing, workforces must be receptive to new methods and capable of operating within highly regulated, time-sensitive environments.

At the same time, geography remains a defining feature of the sector’s workforce challenge. Many processing facilities sit in remote areas, close to farming hubs and supply routes. Accessing and training talent in these regions requires a different approach. It stands to reason that this approach should be rooted in local networks, ongoing skills development, and the ability to build qualified, reliable pools of workers who can move in and out of operations as demand fluctuates.

This cyclical nature is one of the clearest characteristics of agro-processing. Demand rises and falls not only according to production cycles but also consumer buying patterns. These realities create a constant need to balance fixed labour with temporary and seasonal capacity – a balance the sector cannot achieve without flexible staffing models that allow costs to move with production.

This is where sector-specific talent management matters. BLU by Adcorp’s expanded focus on agro-processing is about aligning the entire red meat and poultry processing ecosystem, from recruitment to workforce management, to the demands of the environment – a high-intensity operation where both quality and speed matter, and where production cannot stall simply because labour is unavailable or under-prepared. It relies on high volumes of people and complex operational cycles, and managing these dynamics requires recruitment experience built inside the industry, not alongside it. This means having a deep, practical understanding of factory-floor realities, production pressures, compliance requirements, and the human factors that enable efficiency and consistency.

Contingent and flexible staffing models are central to this approach. They give processors the ability to match workforce size with production peaks, reduce labour-related risks, and maintain continuity without carrying costs through quieter periods. They also ensure that facilities can run extended shifts, meet strict turnaround targets for perishables, and support production surges linked to seasonal demand. 

For the sector’s stakeholders, the message is consistent: agro-processing needs recruitment partners who understand its pace, pressures, and potential. It needs staffing models that reflect the realities of seasonality, perishability, and compliance, and talent strategies that can scale without compromising quality. And, while technology will continue to reshape production lines, it is the human capability behind those systems that ultimately turns raw input into value and potential into performance.