Why the Food Industry Needs More Translators, Not Just Specialists

The food industry does not suffer from a lack of expertise. If anything, it is dense with it. Food safety professionals who understand risk at a molecular level. Formulation scientists who can solve complex stability and sensory challenges. Processing teams who know how to make products run at scale. Quality and commercial teams who protect the brand and the customer relationship. Each function is highly capable on its own.

Where things break is in the space between those capabilities.

Most problems do not start as technical failures. They start as handoffs that are too thin, assumptions that go unspoken or decisions made in isolation. When expertise stays confined to functional lanes, even strong teams can unintentionally work at cross-purposes. Projects slow not because people do not know what they are doing, but because no one is accountable for connecting how one decision affects the next team downstream.

Some of the most effective people I have worked with were never defined by their job titles. They were the ones who could move between teams and translate priorities without diluting them. They knew when a formulation change would complicate processing before it ever reached the plant. They could explain commercial urgency to technical teams without turning it into pressure. They understood trade-offs early, while there was still room to adjust, rather than after timelines and capital were already locked in.

"Translation is not about replacing specialists or diluting expertise. It is about connecting it. It means asking questions earlier than what feels comfortable. It means slowing a project down just enough to understand whether a problem is technical, procedural or simply a communication gap."

I have been part of projects where a seemingly minor formulation tweak created major processing issues because no one paused to walk through the downstream impact. I have also seen processing teams shut down ideas without context, leaving R&D unsure whether the issue was technical, operational or simply a matter of timing. In both cases, the breakdown was not skill. It was alignment. Everyone was acting rationally within their own frame, but no one was holding the full picture.

Translation is not about replacing specialists or diluting expertise. It is about connecting it. It means asking questions earlier than what feels comfortable. It means slowing a project down just enough to understand whether a problem is technical, procedural or simply a communication gap. It means making the ripple effects of decisions visible so teams can adjust before those ripples turn into rework.

Growth makes this harder, not easier. As organizations expand, products multiply, customer demands increase and regulatory complexity grows. Specialization deepens and silos form naturally. I have watched teams hit every internal metric they were measured on while a project, viewed end-to-end, continued to miss deadlines and burn budget. No one failed individually, yet the system did.

Project intake is often where these issues first show up. When requests arrive without context, priority or clear success criteria, technical teams are pushed into reactive mode. Decisions get made quickly but narrowly. Assumptions replace alignment. I have lived that reality. Over time, it erodes trust, creates friction between functions and quietly burns people out. Clear intake processes do not reduce flexibility or slow innovation. They protect it by preventing unnecessary churn and rework.

Career development suffers from the same disconnect. I have seen highly capable technical professionals told they need to “be more strategic” without ever being shown how strategy decisions are actually made. Without visibility into tradeoffs, constraints and decision frameworks, that feedback becomes frustrating rather than empowering. Organizations that make their decision logic explicit do more than develop talent. They build leaders who can think beyond their own function and act with confidence.

Specialists will always matter. Depth of expertise is nonnegotiable in food. But integration matters just as much. The companies that continue to move forward are not only the ones with the strongest technical talent. They are the ones that recognize the value of people who can connect dots across functions, surface misalignment early and turn expertise into progress rather than friction.