If you manufacture food, you have probably asked yourself this question at some point: do I hire someone full-time to handle food safety, or do I bring in a consultant? I get this question constantly, and the honest answer is that it depends on the size and stage of your operation.
The Short Answer on Who To Hire?
For small and medium food manufacturers, I usually recommend working with a consultant rather than hiring a full-time food safety professional. For medium to large manufacturers, the picture shifts. At that size, you typically need someone in a management role internally, someone who can coordinate food safety across departments day to day, supported by a consultant for strategy and specialized projects.
There is no single right answer that fits every business. The right structure depends on your size, your product complexity, your certification requirements, and how much internal capacity you actually have to dedicate to food safety.
How Food Consultant Work With Smaller Manufacturers?
At SFPM Consulting, a large part of our work is with smaller food manufacturers who do not have the budget or the volume to justify a full-time food safety hire. Our model with our clients is straightforward. We build their food safety program from the ground up, and just as importantly, we teach them how to run it.
Once a client passes their certification or audit, they often maintain the program on their own. About 25 percent of our clients choose to keep working with us after that point, mainly for ongoing audit preparation and support as regulations or standards evolve. The rest take what we built and taught them and run with it internally.
This is the model that works for most small and medium manufacturers. You get the expertise to build something solid the first time, your staff learns how to maintain it, and you are not carrying the cost of a full-time salary for a role that does not need to be full-time yet.
What Medium to Large Manufacturers Actually Need
As you grow, the calculation changes. A medium to large manufacturer usually has more product lines, more staff, more shifts, and more moving parts across the plant. At that scale, food safety needs someone internal who is present every day, coordinating between production, sanitation, quality, and management.
This is where I tell clients they need a management-level hire, not just a coordinator handling paperwork. This person owns the day-to-day system. They are the one who knows what is happening on the floor in real time. But even at this size, I still recommend keeping a consultant in the picture for strategic direction, regulatory updates, and specialized projects like a new certification or a major process change.
The Mistake I See Most Often For Managing Food Safety Internally Alone.
The most common mistake I see is business owners thinking they are saving money by not using a consultant. They assume their internal staff has it handled. The problem is that staff errors in a food safety program often do not surface right away. Everything looks fine on paper until an audit or inspection exposes gaps that have been building for a long time.
By that point, the cost is much higher than it would have been to get it right from the start. You are dealing with corrective actions, delayed certifications, or in worse cases, failed audits that put customer relationships at risk. I have also seen staff end up spending more time managing the fallout from audits and inspections than doing the actual work they were hired to do, which is running production and maintaining day-to-day operations. The irony is that trying to avoid the cost of a consultant often ends up costing more in lost time and delayed problem solving.
What Actually Works to Pay Less to Your Consultant?
Hints, it is not about poorly paying your consultant, rather a strategic one.
Here is the advice I give paying clients that you do not see written up online. Use your consultant for management-level strategy and use your staff for implementation. The consultant should be helping you make decisions about direction, timing, and what the program needs to look like. Your staff should be the ones executing the day-to-day tasks that keep the program running.
The part that trips people up is knowing when to bring in a consultant in the first place. It is not just when you are starting from zero. It is also when you are adding a new certification, expanding into a new market, dealing with a regulatory change, or when your internal team is stretched too thin to catch problems before an audit does. Waiting until something goes wrong is the expensive way to find out you needed help.
How to Think About This Question for Your Own Business?
If you are a small or medium manufacturer building your first HACCP or SQF program, working with a consultant to build the system and train your team is usually the more practical and cost-effective path. You get expert-level work without carrying a full-time salary for a role your volume does not yet require.
If you are a medium to large manufacturer with multiple lines and shifts, you likely need someone internal in a management role, with a consultant supporting strategy, audits, and specialized projects as they come up.
Either way, this decision is not about avoiding cost. It is about matching the right level of support to where your business actually is right now, and being honest about where the gaps are before an auditor finds them for you.
A Practical Next Step
If you are not sure which side of this you fall on, start by looking honestly at where your program currently stands and where the gaps are. A gap assessment gives you a clear picture of what your team can handle internally and where you need outside expertise, whether that is building a program from scratch, preparing for an audit, or defining what a management-level hire should actually own.
If you want a second set of eyes on this, I offer a complimentary strategy call to talk through what makes sense for your specific operation.