Ever wondered how your career experience compares to that of your peers? Do you question whether your employees are really happy with their working conditions? And what about the question that’s ultimately on everyone’s mind – do I make enough money? Those are just some of the reasons we decided that the time was right for our first-ever salary survey, designed to serve as a benchmark for not only judging salary levels, but also to gauge where the industry stands in terms of worker demographics, education and job satisfaction.
The survey was conducted online over several weeks this September exclusively for Food in Canada by the Research department of the Business and Professional Publishing Group of Rogers Publishing. Sent to more than 5,000 industry professionals, the survey had a 6.1-per-cent completed response rate, and a margin of error of +/- 4.1 per cent 19 times out of 20.
Demographics
Sixty per cent of survey respondents were male, with the mean age of participants being 44.8 years old. A whopping 93 per cent of participants said they worked full time in the food and beverage industry, and listed a wide range of different industry sectors. Of these, the ingredients and additives manufacturing sector, the meat sector, the bake and snack foods sector and the beverage sector had the highest representation, in that order.
Most participants wrote that they had been in the food and beverage processing industry for more than a decade, with 18.4 years being the mean number of years in the industry. By comparison, 33 per cent of respondents said they had been with their current company for between one and five years (and 11 per cent for less than a year), while the next largest group, at 26 per cent, said they had been there for 16 years or longer. As expected, 44 per cent of respondents said they had held their current position for between one and five years (10 per cent for less than a year), with titles ranging from food scientist/engineer/technician (15 per cent) and CEO or president (10 per cent), to director/manager of Sales and Marketing (10 per cent) and director/manager of R&D (10 per cent), and everything in between.
Fifty-six per cent of completed surveys came from Ontario and 12 per cent from Quebec, while the rest were polled from across all other provinces of the country. Both large and small-scale operations were represented in the survey, with 26 per cent of respondents saying they work for companies with between 10 to 49 employees, and another 26 per cent saying their companies employ between 100 and 149 staff members. Perhaps not surprisingly then, 52 per cent of respondents said they have daily access to their company’s executive.
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