Interim or Permanent? What’s Right for Your Business Right Now?
The Future of Food: Trends, Tech and Changing Tastes in 2025
The UK food and drink manufacturing industry is always moving and in 2025, the pace feels faster than ever. With new technology, shifting consumer demands and constant pressure to stay competitive, manufacturers are being asked to do more than just keep up. They need to be forward-thinking, agile and ready to adapt.
At True North Talent, we spend our time speaking to leaders, candidates and businesses across the industry. That means we’ve got a front-row seat to the changes shaping the sector right now.
In our fifth article, we look at recruitment and workforce planning and how it affects industries.
Interim or Permanent? What’s Right for Your Business Right Now?
When it comes to building a strong team in the food and drink manufacturing industry, one size definitely doesn’t fit all. Sometimes you need a long-term leader to shape your future strategy, while other times you need an experienced professional who can hit the ground running and fix an immediate problem. That’s where the choice between permanent and interim hiring comes in.
When Permanent Hiring Makes Sense
Permanent hires are the backbone of your organisation. They’re the people who help set long-term direction, build teams and carry your culture forward. If you’re looking for stability, leadership continuity, or to nurture specialist skills for the future, then a permanent hire is often the right choice. Think operations directors driving efficiency year after year, or NPD leaders shaping innovation pipelines over the long term.
When Interim Hiring Is the Better Fit
But what if you don’t have the luxury of time? Interim hires are ideal when you face immediate challenges or short-term projects. Maybe you’re going through a factory expansion, need to cover sudden leadership gaps, or want a fresh perspective on a technical or compliance issue. Experienced interims can step in quickly, deliver results and then step away when their work is done, keeping your business moving without long-term commitments.
Striking the Right Balance
It’s not about choosing one over the other; it’s about matching the right solution to your business challenge. Permanent hires build for the future, while interims help you solve problems today. The key is understanding when each is most valuable. At True North Talent, our clients will often request us to provide an interim whilst they retain us for their permanent hires.
How True North Talent Can Help
At True North Talent, we know the unique pressures of food and drink manufacturing. Our network spans both permanent leaders and seasoned interim professionals, so whether you need someone to deliver a transformation project, step into a senior role at short notice, or commit to long-term leadership, we can connect you with the right solution, fast.
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Emma Symonds
Director
Emma Symonds is Director of True North Talent and a leading specialist in Food and Drink Manufacturing recruitment, with 20 years’ experience in permanent and interim hiring, executive search and talent strategy, supporting organisations and senior leaders across the UK food, drink and manufacturing sectors.
Latest Insights
Explore our latest market insights on all things food and drink manufacturing.
How specialist recruiters reduce downtime across critical site leads and technical roles
Your Engineering Manager resigns on a Friday afternoon. By Monday you've briefed three agencies. By Wednesday you're looking at twenty-two CVs, and eighteen of them have never set foot in a food environment. You've now lost most of a week and you're no closer to filling the role. The line is still running, the planned maintenance schedule is already slipping, and your Operations Manager has picked up a second job on top of their own. This is the point where the difference between a generalist agency and a specialist recruiter stops being a procurement preference and starts costing you output.
The true cost of a bad hire and why Food Manufacturers are struggling to hire middle-management roles
A new Shift Manager starts in March. By June the pattern is clear. Changeovers are taking longer than they used to, the paperwork lands late more often than not, and two of your stronger line leaders have started asking about roles at the site down the road. Nobody has done anything obviously wrong. The operation is just running worse than it was. That's what a bad hire in middle management usually looks like. It rarely announces itself, and it almost never shows up as a single event you can point at. It gets worse over time, and by the time you've named the problem you've lost six months.
When to Hire Permanent vs. Interim in Food Manufacturing
Your Technical Manager hands in their notice on a Monday morning. There's a BRCGS audit eight weeks out, a customer visit before that, and a quality management system only one person on site properly understands. By Monday afternoon, you're already behind. Production has its own version. A shift manager goes off sick with no return date. A supervisor steps up to cover, and three weeks later that supervisor is taking calls from an agency, because the extra responsibility arrived without the extra money. Both situations force the same decision. Do you run a permanent search and live with the gap, bring in an interim, or do both at once?
How specialist recruiters reduce downtime across critical site leads and technical roles
Your Engineering Manager resigns on a Friday afternoon. By Monday you've briefed three agencies. By Wednesday you're looking at twenty-two CVs, and eighteen of them have never set foot in a food environment. You've now lost most of a week and you're no closer to filling the role. The line is still running, the planned maintenance schedule is already slipping, and your Operations Manager has picked up a second job on top of their own. This is the point where the difference between a generalist agency and a specialist recruiter stops being a procurement preference and starts costing you output.
The true cost of a bad hire and why Food Manufacturers are struggling to hire middle-management roles
A new Shift Manager starts in March. By June the pattern is clear. Changeovers are taking longer than they used to, the paperwork lands late more often than not, and two of your stronger line leaders have started asking about roles at the site down the road. Nobody has done anything obviously wrong. The operation is just running worse than it was. That's what a bad hire in middle management usually looks like. It rarely announces itself, and it almost never shows up as a single event you can point at. It gets worse over time, and by the time you've named the problem you've lost six months.
When to Hire Permanent vs. Interim in Food Manufacturing
Your Technical Manager hands in their notice on a Monday morning. There's a BRCGS audit eight weeks out, a customer visit before that, and a quality management system only one person on site properly understands. By Monday afternoon, you're already behind. Production has its own version. A shift manager goes off sick with no return date. A supervisor steps up to cover, and three weeks later that supervisor is taking calls from an agency, because the extra responsibility arrived without the extra money. Both situations force the same decision. Do you run a permanent search and live with the gap, bring in an interim, or do both at once?
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