Are you looking for a new job? Or perhaps looking for the perfect new employee to add to your team?

If you’re looking for someone specifically with food industry experience (or you’re looking for your next food industry job), I’ve compiled a list of 10 food and beverage recruiters who can help you find the perfect match.

Regardless of the particular industry, it’s becoming more and more difficult to attract and retain good employees. Potential employees look for the money, stay for the relationships, and talk about the development they get at work. Good managers are critical, and your company culture should always be a primary area of focus. Keep the following five things in mind when determining your corporate employment strategy.

In this post, you will see, what successful manufacturing leaders do from 8 am to 8 pm. We also included some other tips successful folks do before 8 am and right before bed to stay as optimized as possible, including a few productivity tools.

The Centra Foods sales team recently attended the National College & University Foodservice conference for the Pacific and Continental regions. On the first morning of the conference, I presented at one of the breakout sessions.

I talked about Leadership Transitioning — how to most efficiently and smoothly step into a new role and begin to make changes that positively affect (and sometimes completely re-direct) your company. For this conference, this discussion was related solely to college foodservice.

Everyone in the food industry that I know is stressed — busy, happy (and meaningfully) stressed. This can be a blessing and a curse. It means that there’s lots to be done, with great opportunities to make change in your company and affect the food industry for the better… but there’s still LOTS to be done.

When our plates are overwhelmed with work, were often overly stressed as well.

If you’re in the food industry, here’s 10 ways that you can take a load off and reduce your stress — without losing your edge — in your job.

“The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. The last is to say thank you. In between the two, the leader must become a servant and a debtor”.   Max De Pree, Leadership Is An Art

This is my favorite quote from the book Leadership is an Art. It is an attempt by the author to answer the rather large question, what is leadership?

The thing I love about this quote is that it’s so utterly true. It is the first concise description that I’ve found that explains, wholly and completely the beginning and end of what a leader is most responsible for. If they can just do these things, everything else will fall into place.

Do you worry about how you’re going to reach all of your goals in 2016?

January is a time when many people are looking at the big picture over the next year — which can be an overwhelming task.

Maybe you feel like giving up at times, or you aren’t getting noticed at your job by anyone. If you have ever felt like that, don’t worry — you will make it.

In this blog, I will be using some of my favorite quotes to help encourage you if you’re feeling overwhelmed, if you feel like giving up, or if you feel like you’re not being seen for your hard work.

I don’t know about you, but I always forget to put up my out of office replies. It’s something that I remember to do late at night or early in the morning on the first day of my vacation.

When I do put them up, I’m always in such a rush to get out the door (or back to my breakfast) that I usually go with the generic response you always see.

“I’m out of the office… Please contact so and so.”

But I was recently inspired to do better — hilariously better. And in the spirit of the upcoming holidays, I’ve compiled my favorite list of the best out of office replies I’ve seen.

Creating a marketing strategy is always a challenge — for any brand. But in the food industry, I think businesses encounter really unique challenges to market their products.

As the VP of Marketing and Sales at Centra Foods, I’ve kept a close eye on B2B and B2C companies implementing their own marketing strategies. I also do a lot of research on marketing in the food space, and I think that marketing for food brands in the natural and organic industry requires some unique advice.

I’m going to go over 7 basics that I’d recommend for any natural food brands working in the B2C space. That is, business to consumer — selling directly to retail grocery stores and/or end consumers.

This isn’t a set-in-stone rulebook, but more of a recommendation based on advice from marketing pros, taking into account what other food brands in the natural/organic space are doing.

Building a great team is one of the hardest things you can be tasked with as a leader.

It’s not just about hiring either — building a team is a slow growth process and your leadership will create the atmosphere that will make your team either succeed or fail. Or at least that’s what Simon Sinek says…

Simon Sinek is the author of Leaders Eat Last, one of the best business books on the market today. He also has one of the top-watched TedTalks in the world, with almost 24 million views.

I saw him speak last fall, and he’s nothing short of inspiring. His words will help you create a team of loyal employees that will build your business into a indestructible (and much loved) powerhouse.

Today, we will review some of the main points of Leaders Eat Last. We will also talk about how you can put them into place to build the best possible team (and company) in the food industry.

This summer, I attended a conference on leadership called the Global Leadership Summit. I was invited by a friend, who sold me on the idea by telling me that Brené Brown would be speaking.

What I got (in addition to Brené, of course) was 2 full days of inspiring talks that influenced me to want to be a better leader, a better team member and a better person across my entire life. They also gave me the tools to figure out how to do better.

My primary homework now (of course, because who doesn’t love homework?) is to read a lot of leadership books. A LOT.

Inspired to add to my book list, I searched on Amazon for the best books on leadership. And guess what I found… Many of these speakers that I watched at this summit also ended up on the Amazon “best-books” list. That’s because they’re true leaders in their field.

If I learned anything during this conference, it was that their words and ideas are worth the time you’ll put towards learning.

Branding your organic food company should be pretty simple right? People want what you have — all you need to do is tell them about it and voila! you should make sales.

In reality, however, branding an organic food company is a unique challenge. You’re selling to a niche market. Organic foods are in high demand, but at the same time, new products are emerging every day to meet consumers’ growing hunger. And often times, large national brands (with existing recognition and shelf appeal) are the ones releasing these new organic product lines.

So how do you, a small and growing organic company, compete?

Want to help build your company? Be a good leader? Leave a legacy in your wake?

Of course you do. We all do.

There’s functional skills that every leader needs to have to be successful. But what about the stuff deep down? You know when you meet a person and you think — they are clearly a born leader. Ever wonder what the basic, god-given personality traits are that make up that person? What makes leading so natural for them?

In his book The Intangibles of Leadership, Richard Davis argues that a person with an entire toolkit of learned “functional leadership” skills can still fail if they don’t possess the most important intangible personality traits.

On the flip side, those ingrained with the most important intangible traits will always be able to learn the necessary functional skills to be a leader. So at the end of the day, to lead, you have to have these intangibles.