The executive talent shortage in fresh produce is making senior appointments harder, slower, and more compromised than they should be.
Organisations operating in fresh produce are being asked to lead through increasing complexity — sustainability demands, digital adoption, global supply chain volatility, shifting retailer relationships. And the people expected to navigate all of that are, too often, the same people who have been navigating it for twenty years. The pool is simply not replenishing at the rate it is being depleted.
What makes this particularly difficult is that the ways fresh produce businesses have traditionally responded to hiring pressure — tap the network, ask around, promote internally or poach from a competitor — are no longer working as well as they once did. The market has genuinely changed. The hiring behaviour, by and large, has not.
As a result, fresh produce leadership hiring challenges are becoming more visible. Executive search can no longer operate reactively. Talent scarcity across the wider agribusiness landscape has shifted from an occasional frustration to a structural constraint.
Why the Same Candidates Keep Circulating
Part of what makes fresh produce distinctive is also what makes it so difficult to hire into at senior levels. It is an industry built on trust, on long relationships, on knowing how things work in practice rather than on paper. Those qualities attract a certain kind of person and, over time, produce a relatively closed ecosystem at the top.
The sector is dominated, particularly at mid-market level, by privately held, often family-run businesses. Leadership succession in those businesses tends to be managed internally or through close personal networks. When an external hire is needed, the search almost always starts in the same place: who do we know? Who just left a competitor? Who is everyone talking about?
The result is that the same candidates circulate through the market repeatedly. They are well known, often capable, and increasingly expensive. They also carry the same set of assumptions about how the industry works, what is and is not possible, and what good leadership looks like. That is perhaps fine when the operating environment is stable. It is more of a problem when it is not.
Industry data reflects this. Reports from within the sector point to an ageing senior workforce, limited inflow of new executive-level talent, and a sector that — compared to FMCG brands, technology businesses, or large retailers — remains relatively unknown to people building careers outside it. The pipeline is narrower than most boards realise.
Referrals Were Never Designed for This
Referrals made sense when the talent pool was deep enough that a well-connected person could genuinely surface strong, varied candidates. They were a shortcut, but a reasonable one. That has changed.
When a board asks its CEO who they would recommend for a senior commercial role, the CEO recommends someone they have worked with, someone in their professional circle, someone who fits the mould of what they already know. That is not a criticism — it is just how referrals work. The problem is that in a sector with a limited number of senior executives to begin with, personal networks have become so overlapping that referrals rarely surface anyone new. They surface the same people, again.
There is also a diversity dimension worth considering. Research consistently shows that referral-heavy hiring produces demographically narrow outcomes. Most people’s professional networks reflect their own background, sector, geography, and career trajectory. When referrals are the primary recruitment mechanism, the people already visible in the network get hired, and the people outside it — however capable — do not.
There is also the timing problem. Most fresh produce businesses start thinking about executive recruitment when a vacancy becomes urgent. By that point, the pressure is high, the timeline is short, and the temptation to appoint the most available candidate — rather than the best one — is significant. A reactive process, driven by referrals, almost guarantees a suboptimal outcome.
“They Need to Know the Industry” — and Other Things Worth Questioning
The most consistent hiring filter in fresh produce is sector experience. It sounds like diligence. In practice, it often functions as a ceiling that cuts off access to a much wider pool of genuinely capable leaders.
The underlying concern is legitimate. Fresh produce has genuine operational complexity — perishability, margin pressure, seasonal volatility, highly specific supplier relationships. A leader who has never encountered these things does need time to get up to speed.
But there is a difference between what a leader needs to understand and what they need to have already lived. And that distinction is not being made carefully enough. Recent industry reports suggest that senior roles in fresh produce now require far more than product knowledge — skills like data interpretation, customer insight, stakeholder management, and commercial thinking built around digital tools have become central. These are not skills that are uniquely developed in fresh produce. They are built across food manufacturing, chilled logistics, FMCG, retail category management, and elsewhere.
What often happens is that ‘sector experience’ becomes shorthand for ‘someone who thinks like us.’ That is understandable, particularly in businesses where culture is deeply embedded. But it is worth asking whether that instinct is protecting the business or protecting the status quo.
There are signs this is shifting, at least in some quarters. There is growing openness — particularly in finance, operations, and HR functions — to leaders coming from adjacent industries. The businesses moving in this direction are not lowering the bar. They are drawing it in a different place.
Where Fresh Produce Leaders Are Actually Being Found
The more sophisticated approach to produce leadership hiring is proactive and research-led. Rather than activating a search when a role opens, it involves continuous mapping of where relevant talent exists — in the sector, in adjacent industries, and internationally.
International recruitment has become a more serious option for a growing number of businesses. Leaders with backgrounds in Southern European growing regions, Southern Hemisphere export operations, or North American produce bring both sector depth and a different frame of reference. The logistical and cultural complexity of cross-border hiring is real, but businesses that have worked through it tend to find it worthwhile.
Adjacent sectors are also yielding genuine talent. Senior commercial leaders from food service, operations directors from chilled logistics, category heads from major grocery retail — these are people who have built the capabilities fresh produce businesses need, often at greater scale and with more developed analytical infrastructure than the sector typically deploys internally. They are not perfect fits from day one. But with the right onboarding, they can be better fits than the recirculated internal candidate who was appointed because the search ran out of time.
The common thread is that finding these people requires effort that starts well before a vacancy exists. Talent mapping. Regular market intelligence. An ongoing view of who is developing, where, and at what pace. It is a different kind of work to posting a role or making a few calls.
What Boards Must Change to Address the Executive Talent Shortage in Fresh Produce
Perhaps the most telling statistic is this: research suggests that over half of organisations have no formal succession plan in place for senior roles. In a sector where the executive talent pool is already limited and retirements are accelerating, that is a genuinely precarious position.
Boards in fresh produce businesses need to look honestly at how they hire. Not at whether the last appointment went well — that is too small a question. At whether the process by which they appoint senior leaders is actually capable of surfacing the best available talent, or whether it is primarily capable of surfacing the most familiar.
That requires, first, some honest scrutiny of hiring criteria. For each senior role, it is worth asking which requirements genuinely demand fresh produce experience and which are inherited assumptions that have never really been tested. The answer is usually more nuanced than the job specification implies.
It also requires separating the search process from the network. Working with an executive search partner who has existing contacts in the fresh produce sector is of course highly beneficial. But the added value of a search partner also comes from research capability and market reach — the ability to find and assess candidates who are not already known to the people doing the hiring.
And it requires treating onboarding as part of the hiring decision. If opening up to broader talent means appointing someone who needs time to learn the specifics of the sector, then the onboarding process has to be designed to make that work. This is not unusual. It is how most high-performing organisations in other industries approach executive hiring. Fresh produce is not so different that it cannot do the same.
How LCR Approaches This Differently
The traditional fresh produce network, for all its strengths, is no longer sufficient for senior executive hiring. That’s why our market-mapping methodology does not wait for a vacancy. We maintain ongoing intelligence about leadership talent across fresh produce and the sectors adjacent to it, so that when a board comes to us with a role, the search does not start from scratch.
We are also willing to have the uncomfortable conversation about hiring criteria. Not to push clients towards candidates who are wrong for them, but to make sure that the criteria being used are actually serving the appointment — rather than just reproducing whoever was hired last time.
The executive talent shortage in fresh produce is changing how senior appointments are made, but it is not a fixed constraint. There are leaders capable of doing these roles exceptionally well who are not currently visible to the businesses that need them. Finding them takes a different kind of search. If you’d like a confidential conversation about your succession pipeline or an upcoming hire, we would welcome it.
