The fresh produce sector has long operated on the assumption that its pay norms are reasonable because they reflect what other businesses pay. That logic worked when the talent pool was largely self-contained, but does not work as well today.
Your Best Candidates May Already Be Out of Your Range
Senior leaders in fresh produce, people with genuine commercial depth, international supply chain experience, and the credibility to influence major retail relationships, are fielding approaches from outside the sector more regularly than they were even three years ago.
FMCG businesses have noticed that fresh produce executives carry a specific kind of capability. They are used to perishable margins, complex logistics, unpredictable growing conditions, and demanding retail buyers. That experience translates. A VP of Commercial who has managed £200 million of fresh produce category across multiple retailers has skills that are genuinely appealing to branded food companies, food technology businesses, and sustainability-focused agriculture ventures.
Those sectors pay differently. Not always spectacularly more, but enough. And they often come with bonus structures, long-term incentive plans, and equity arrangements that many fresh produce businesses have not yet built into their packages.
So when a fresh produce business goes to market with a base salary benchmarked against what its peers paid 18 months ago, it is not just competing against other fresh produce businesses. It is competing against a much wider field.
The FMCG and Agri-Tech Pull Is Real
The growth of food technology investment has created a new class of well-funded employer willing to pay for experienced food and agriculture talent. Precision fermentation businesses, agri-biotech firms, and supply chain technology platforms are all actively recruiting from traditional produce and food backgrounds.
These businesses are often venture-backed or recently listed. They think about compensation differently. Long-term incentives, performance-linked equity, and generous relocation or remote-working provisions are standard rather than exceptional.
At the same time, major FMCG players have been expanding their fresh and chilled categories. When they hire into those divisions, they want people who already understand the operational reality. Fresh produce executives are, in many cases, exactly what they are looking for.
The result is that the best candidates, those with 15 to 20 years of hard-won fresh produce experience, are rarely sitting passively waiting to move within the sector. They have options. And those options are increasingly coming from outside.
Outdated Benchmarking is a Real Risk
A huge problem is that most internal compensation benchmarks are built from data that is already stale by the time decisions are made.
Proxy filings and published salary surveys typically reflect decisions made 12 to 18 months prior. A board setting compensation in 2026 is, in many cases, looking at market data from 2024. A lot has shifted in that window, including inflation recovery, increased cross-sector competition for commercial talent, and rising candidate expectations around variable pay and long-term incentives.
There is also the question of what "comparable" actually means. Benchmarking against businesses of similar size within the sector sounds sensible, but it can create a closed loop where the industry collectively anchors to a number that no longer reflects what is needed to win the best candidates. Peer-to-peer benchmarking, done in isolation, has a tendency to drift downwards over time relative to broader market conditions.
The danger is not just that you lose a candidate. It is that you lose the right candidate to a competitor or an adjacent sector, and then spend considerably more on an extended search to find someone comparable.
What Competitive Looks Like Right Now
This varies by role, geography, and business size. But in general terms, a few things stand out as increasingly important in offers that are landing with senior fresh produce candidates.
Base salary remains the foundation, and it needs to be genuinely reflective of current market conditions rather than where the market was. But candidates at senior level are now scrutinising total package much more carefully.
Performance-related bonus, clearly structured and with meaningful upside, is increasingly expected rather than appreciated. Candidates want to know what good looks like, and what they could realistically earn in a strong year.
Long-term incentive plans, whether equity, phantom equity, or profit participation, are becoming a more common expectation at director level and above, particularly in private-equity backed or growth-stage businesses. For many candidates, this signals that the business sees them as a long-term investment rather than a hire.
Flexibility, not just location flexibility but autonomy over how the role is structured, is weighted more heavily by experienced leaders than it was five years ago. This is perhaps the area produce businesses find hardest to adapt to, given the operational nature of the industry.
Benefits provision, particularly private medical cover, pension contributions above statutory minimum, and clearly articulated development investment, round out a package that signals genuine competitiveness.
Competing Without Breaking Internal Equity
This is where it gets genuinely difficult, and it is worth being honest about that. Paying a new hire significantly above the current band can create internal friction, particularly when long-serving employees have not seen their own salaries move at the same pace.
There is no clean answer to this. But there are some practical approaches worth considering.
One is to separate the conversation about external hire compensation from the internal benchmarking exercise, and to treat a senior external search as an opportunity to reset the role's market positioning, with a plan to review the broader band alongside it.
Another is to build more of the competitiveness into the variable and long-term elements of the package rather than the base. This preserves internal equity at the fixed pay level while allowing the total opportunity to compete externally. It also aligns the candidate's interests with business performance, which most boards find easier to justify.
A third is to get a clearer picture of what the market actually looks like before the role goes live. Not from published data alone, but from genuine, current market intelligence. The gap between what you think the market pays and what candidates are actually receiving at point of offer can be significant. Knowing that gap early means you can design a package that works, rather than redesigning it mid-process when you have already lost momentum.
The Case for a Compensation Conversation Before You Hire
The most common point of failure in senior fresh produce searches is not the quality of the candidate shortlist. It is the moment when a well-qualified candidate receives an offer and finds it falls short of their current package, let alone their expectations for a move.
Fixing that at offer stage is expensive and often unsuccessful. The candidate has mentally moved on. The search restarts. Time is lost.
Getting a clear view of current compensation expectations before the role is even written is a straightforward way to avoid that scenario. It does not need to be a lengthy process. A focused conversation with someone who is actively placing senior produce leaders, who can tell you what candidates at that level are currently receiving and what it would actually take to move them, can shape the brief in a way that saves months downstream.
If you are planning a senior or executive hire in the next six months and want a clear picture of where the market sits right now, we are happy to have that conversation. No agenda, no obligation. Just an honest view of what competitive looks like in the current climate.
Reach out to our team to arrange a market insight conversation before your role goes live.
