Margin isn’t lost on the shelf, but on the plant floor. That’s the central argument Tim Cook has been making to food manufacturing executives for years, and it’s one that increasingly hard-to-ignore data is backing up.
Cook brings more than three decades of operational experience to the conversation, having served as President and CEO of LINXIS Group and Shick Esteve, and as VP of Automation at AMF Bakery Systems. Now an advisor to WorkForge, he’s been working to help manufacturers do something deceptively difficult: put real numbers on the costs they’ve long accepted as simply part of doing business.
His focus is on what he calls “leaking costs”: turnover, slow time to proficiency, preventable downtime, waste, performance inconsistency, and the workforce development failures that connect them. The findings, drawn from WorkForge’s research report, point to a problem that is measurable, addressable, and far more expensive than most executives realize.
Cook will be presenting these findings in depth during an upcoming webinar on Thursday, February 26 at 1 PM EST.
We reached out to him ahead of the webinar to dig into what he’s seeing on plant floors today and what leaders can do about it.
You’ve spent 30+ years inside food manufacturing operations. When you talk about “hidden costs on the plant floor,” what’s the one that surprises executives most when they finally see it quantified?
It’s the real cost of turnover.
Most executives understand that turnover is expensive from a recruiting standpoint. What they don’t always see is how deeply it touches performance. When you quantify the ripple effects — new hire ramp time, overtime to cover gaps, inconsistent quality, safety exposure, loss of institutional knowledge — it’s far more significant than most expect.
Turnover isn’t just an HR issue. It’s an operational stability issue.
And once leaders see the full cost, the conversation changes. It moves from “this is just the nature of food production” to “we have a systematic problem we can improve.”
A lot of these costs get accepted as just the cost of doing business. Why does that mindset persist?
Because employers get stuck in a frustrating cycle of burnout and turnover — and they accept it as “part of the business.”
I’ve heard many leaders say some version of, “If I invest too much in development, I just lose that investment when they walk out the door.” That belief shapes behavior. Instead of building structured career paths (skills tied to raises, progression toward the next role) the focus shifts to squeezing more output from the current workforce.
So operations are driven by pressure. More urgency. More oversight. More brute force.
The problem is that approach isn’t sustainable. It increases burnout. Burnout drives more turnover. And the cycle reinforces itself.
Over time, that instability starts to feel structural, like it’s just the nature of the business.
But it’s not structural. It’s systemic. And systems can be redesigned.
When organizations commit to clear development pathways and reinforce them from the top, retention improves. Stability improves. And performance improves, not because people are being pushed harder, but because they see a future and a reason to stay.
When a plant finally decides to tackle these margin leaks, where should they look first — and what’s the biggest mistake you see early on?
Start with training. But treat it as infrastructure, not orientation.
The biggest mistake I see is assuming training can be handled informally or entirely internally without structured expertise. Manufacturers are experts at production. That doesn’t automatically make them experts in modern learning systems or scalable workforce development.
The second major mistake is lack of executive reinforcement. If training isn’t visibly supported from the top (measured, funded, prioritized) it becomes inconsistent and limited to compliance which drives performance variability.
Plants that make real progress build structured, measurable training systems. They modernize how learning is delivered. They tie skill progression to compensation and advancement. They shorten time to proficiency. And they protect institutional knowledge instead of watching it leave the building.
That’s when you move from reacting to turnover to designing stability.
The report behind your presentation identifies measurable cost drivers. What kind of magnitude are we actually talking about?
The magnitude can be significant.
The report looks at cost drivers tied to workforce instability, things like turnover, slow time to productivity, waste, downtime, employee engagement and performance inconsistency. What’s important is that many of these are what I’d call “leaking costs.” They’re not dramatic on any single day, but over time they compound.
In environments where companies have strengthened training systems and focused seriously on retention, similar to what we’ve seen with WorkForge customers, improvements in certain workforce-related cost areas have reached 20%, 30%, even 40%.
That’s not from new equipment or major capital investment. That’s with the same people and the same assets, just better support, clearer standards, and real career development pathways.
It’s meaningful margin recovery is possible when workforce development is treated with the same rigor as production, and with today’s cost-conscious buyers it is even more critical.
If a CEO, COO, or HR leader reads this and thinks, “That sounds like my plant,” what’s one thing they could do this week?
Establish a baseline and commit to data-driven decisions.
Don’t rely on assumptions. Pull the real numbers: turnover, time to full productivity, unplanned downtime, waste, safety incidents tied to inexperience. Quantify them. Until you know the baseline, you’re managing by feel.
To accelerate that visibility, review the WorkForge study and use the interactive Hidden Cost Calculator. It applies industry benchmarks to your own inputs (salaries, headcount, turnover rates) and helps surface where your biggest leaks may actually be. More importantly, it gives you insight into which cost drivers deserve deeper analysis.
But the objective isn’t just measurement. The objective is breaking the cycle of burnout and turnover.
When you clearly see the data, you can stop reacting and start designing solutions. And once leadership aligns around that goal, workforce stability becomes a strategy, not a hope.
To learn more about how to quantify these costs in your own facility and what other manufacturers have done to fix them, join Tim Cook for next week’s webinar, “Stop Plant-Floor Margin Leakage: How to Quantify and Eliminate Hidden Costs.” Reserve your spot.
Tim Cook is a seasoned expert in the food manufacturing and automation space, with over 30 years of experience driving operational efficiency and workforce development. Tim is currently an Advisor to WorkForge, and has served as the President and CEO of Linxis Group, Shick Esteve, as well as VP of Automation and VP of Sales, Marketing and Product Management at AMF Bakery Systems. With over 30 years of industry experience, Tim can help with practical solutions to the challenges faced by today’s baking and snack producers.
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