Sometimes, a strong candidate, technically sharp, commercially credible, who seems exactly right for the role, goes quiet after the location is mentioned. They might pull out immediately. But more often, they stay in the process just long enough for everyone to invest time and optimism before declining.
The client's instinct is usually to offer more money. But that rarely fixes it.
Location resistance in fresh produce is a genuine, structurally embedded challenge, one that simply increasing the salary won't solve.
Why Fresh Produce Roles Are Uniquely Hard to Sell on Location
Fresh produce is an operationally led industry. The product is perishable. The decisions are time-critical. The infrastructure, growing regions, packing facilities, ripening centres, distribution hubs, is anchored to geography, and that geography is rarely cosmopolitan.
Whether a business is headquartered in Almería, the Salinas Valley, or rural Lincolnshire, its senior leadership team typically needs to be close to the operation. That is a legitimate business requirement. But it creates a structural tension that most other industries do not face. At least not to the same degree.
The wider agri-food sector is already grappling with this. Research from Purdue University and the USDA, published in late 2025 and covering the period through 2030, projects approximately 105,000 annual job openings across food, agriculture and related sectors. Fewer than half will be filled by people trained specifically in the industry. The largest shortfalls are in business and management roles, precisely the senior positions fresh produce companies are competing hardest to fill. The study is explicit: job opportunities are not evenly distributed across regions, and employers will need to incentivise candidates to relocate.
The OECD has separately documented a persistent brain drain from rural to urban areas across its member countries, a dynamic that matters even within fresh produce, where the most experienced professionals tend to concentrate around established hubs: the Netherlands, the south of Spain, the South East of England, the growing regions of North Africa and Latin America. When roles open up at more isolated operational sites, people gravitate toward those hubs, and moving them away from a more convenient or established location takes a compelling reason.
The Hidden Personal Blockers Candidates Never Voice
When asked why they declined, most candidates are too professional to say, "my spouse refused" or "I couldn't face telling my children they'd have to change school again." They will give a polished response about timing, role fit, or compensation. Recruiters and hiring managers who take that answer at face value tend to keep making the same hiring mistakes.
The evidence on what actually drives relocation refusals is consistent across decades of research, and it points firmly away from money.
Family ties remain the single most frequently cited barrier. Since the mid-1990s, there has been a significant rise in employees declining international and domestic relocations due to spousal resistance. In many cases, more than a 50% increase in the rate of refusal compared with earlier decades. Children's education is a close second. Research consistently shows that the majority of parents who consider relocation worry about disrupting their children's schooling, friendships, and social development, a concern that has grown as families become more settled and communities more embedded.
In dual-career households, now the norm for senior executives, a relocation requires two careers to realign, not one. The trailing partner's career is rarely discussed proactively by employers, even though it is frequently the decisive variable. A candidate who earns £150,000 per year will not uproot a partner who earns £100,000 unless the new package and opportunity architecture account for that loss.
Housing costs have their own dynamic. The practical arithmetic of selling a home in one market, potentially absorbing a mortgage penalty, covering transaction costs, and buying into an unfamiliar market is daunting. This is true even where candidates are offered generous relocation packages, and such packages have become less common, not more, in recent years.
Then there are the undisclosed reasons. Candidates don't tell you about the elderly parent they visit every weekend. They don't mention the health condition that requires proximity to a specialist. They don't flag the side engagement, a non-executive role, a business interest, a community commitment, that makes uprooting impractical. These reasons are real and frequent, and almost never appear in a feedback call.
Why Salary Uplifts Alone Don't Solve It
There is a persistent assumption in executive hiring that relocation resistance is primarily a financial problem with a financial solution. Offer more, and the barriers dissolve. The data tells a different story.
Studies of highly educated, high-income professionals consistently show that willingness to relocate for career reasons is remarkably low, often below 30%, regardless of financial incentive. That is a dramatic fall from the 1980s, when over a third of employees across income levels were willing to relocate for work. The trend has moved sharply in one direction.
Research from senior executive search and HR advisory firms highlights the depth of this shift. CHROs consistently report that flexibility and location of work have more impact on people strategy than any other variable. Salary uplifts help at the margins. They do not address identity, family, community, or the psychological cost of displacement.
The quality-of-life dimension also frequently undermines the logic of a pay increase. A candidate moving from an established produce hub, somewhere with a peer network, good schools, decent infrastructure, to a more remote operational site may find that their social and professional world contracts significantly, regardless of what their salary does. The net quality-of-life calculation is not simply financial.
There is also a more fundamental issue. Highly capable executives who are worth pursuing are, by definition, doing well where they are. They have a home they like, a network they have built, and a family with roots. The activation energy required to disrupt all of that is enormous, and a salary increment alone rarely provides it.
What Actually Changes Candidate Thinking
Role design is the most effective lever for changing a candidate's position on location, but it is almost never discussed in job descriptions, and rarely comes up in early-stage hiring conversations.
When candidates genuinely consider relocating for a role, it is typically because the opportunity addresses something deeper than financial reward. Research from leadership advisory practitioners consistently shows that executives who move do so when they can articulate a clear answer to: What does this role do for me that my current situation cannot? The answers that move people are not "more money." They are things like: a step-change in scope and authority, the chance to build something meaningful from the ground up, alignment with a personal mission or professional obsession, or a career narrative that could not be written any other way.
Fresh produce offers genuine versions of all of these. The sector sits at the intersection of global food security, sustainability, and complex commercial management. For the right person, the mission case is powerful. But companies rarely make it explicitly or early enough and instead lead with the job description and the package.
Proactively addressing family concerns changes the economics of the conversation. Companies that support spouse career transition, assist with school search, provide meaningful community integration support, and take the relocation stress off the candidate's family materially improve acceptance rates. This is not a premium perk, rather a basic acknowledgement that senior executives are not relocating alone.
Candidates who have relocated before are significantly more likely to do so again. When building a longlist for a location-sensitive role, someone who relocated for university, worked internationally in their early career, or accepted a geographic move at mid-career has already demonstrated a relocation identity. It is worth prioritising this profile on the longlist.
Transparency, timed correctly, also matters. Springing a challenging location on a candidate after they are emotionally invested creates resentment and withdrawal. Discussing it openly and early, before either side has committed, respects the candidate's situation and allows a genuine conversation about whether it is workable, rather than a polite decline two weeks before offer.
When Relocation Is Not the Right Answer
Before all of this though, ask yourself the simple question: does this role actually need to be based there?
The instinct to anchor senior roles to operational locations is often legitimate. An MD of a growing business who rarely visits the sites is not doing their job. A supply chain director who works entirely from a home office in a distant city is carrying a real structural risk. These roles require presence, and location requirements should be defended when they are genuinely justified.
But "we have always done it this way" is not a justification. Remote and hybrid senior leadership has been demonstrated across multiple industries to be workable where role design supports it. Some fresh produce businesses have solved location problems for senior roles by restructuring around outcomes rather than presence, and have found the right candidate as a result.
The harder challenge is when companies design a role for full-time presence at a specific site, market it to national or international candidates, and then encounter relocation resistance and interpret it as a candidate problem. Often it is a role design problem. A frank, early conversation between the hiring business and its search partner about what the role actually requires, versus what feels comfortable, can reopen the candidate pool significantly.
The same applies to succession. Where external relocation is genuinely intractable, internal talent development is a strategic response. Building a pipeline of leaders who already live within reach of operational sites, and investing in their development, is consistently undervalued relative to the cost and attrition risk of failed external hires who never fully settled.
A Different Kind of Conversation
Location shapes the entire search, the longlist, the approach, the narrative, and the offer architecture.
The most effective thing fresh produce businesses can do is bring this conversation forward. Before a role is briefed, before a longlist is built, before candidates are approached: what does this role genuinely require in terms of location? What is the real family and lifestyle ask? What is the mission case for a candidate who could work anywhere? What support can the business credibly offer?
These are not comfortable questions, but they are significantly less uncomfortable than a failed search, a declined offer, or a leader who joins, struggles to settle, and leaves within two years.
We work with fresh produce businesses precisely because these conversations require sector knowledge, candidate credibility, and the kind of directness that only comes from genuine experience in the market. If you are designing a senior role in a challenging location or have found previous searches failing at the final stage, we would welcome an early conversation.
LCR International specialises in executive search for the global fresh produce industry. Get in touch for a confidential conversation about your leadership needs.
