Chocolate is made by roasting, grinding, conching, tempering and moulding, then wrapped and kept cool. The people on those lines decide flavour, shine and snap, and a hot week or a festival rush tests every one of them.
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Share your requirementsA chocolate maker turns cocoa beans or bought-in cocoa mass into bars, fillings, coatings and moulded pieces. Work moves through roasting or melting, refining, conching, tempering, depositing into moulds, cooling tunnels and wrapping. Much of the quality sits in a few hands: the person who judges temper by sight and touch, and the one who sets the conche time. Rooms are cold, floors are sweet and slippery, and the plant must stay clean because nuts, milk and other allergens share the building. Demand peaks sharply before festivals and gifting seasons, so numbers swing within weeks. Wrapping halls then fill with temporary hands who must learn fast. Related reading: HR for manufacturing.
These are the places the people side of this kind of business tends to give way. The rest of this page works through them.
HR here has to work for each of these groups, not only the office. The set-up below is written with all of them in mind.
GullyHR runs talent acquisition for permanent roles in chocolate manufacturers. For each role we agree the job description with you, find and screen candidates against it, and support the offer through to joining. Tell us the role and the number of people, and we start there.
We recruit permanent employees. We do not supply contract or temporary staff.
Every business interviews, but few have a written process that works the same way for every role and every interviewer. GullyHR designs yours, from the role brief to the offer, trains your managers to run it, and can run it for you on the roles you hand us.
We agree what the role must deliver, the must-have and nice-to-have skills, and how each will be scored.
Screening call, assessment, interview rounds and decision points, sized to the role and the number of people you hire.
Structured questions for each role family and a rating guide, so two interviewers judge the same answer the same way.
A short briefing for your managers on what to ask, what to avoid and how to give a clear yes or no.
Who approves, how the offer is made, and how candidates are kept informed from first call to joining.
Good tempering depends on a handful of operators who read the mass by eye and feel, and when they are off shift the bloom complaints start.
Staff move between warm kitchens and chilled halls all day, and coughs, cold sores and joint pain feed into absence nobody links to the cause.
Temporary hands arrive for a few weeks, learn the pack standard in a day and leave, so errors in weight and sealing rise just when orders are largest.
A nut-free line run after a nut line depends on cleaning steps done by tired people, and a missed step reaches a customer.
Spilt cocoa butter and sugar dust make stairs and floors slick, and minor injuries go unrecorded until a bad one happens.
Long conche cycles run overnight with few supervisors present, and decisions on a faulty batch are left to junior operators.
The same line runs a premium recipe and a store brand in one week, and staff are not always told what changes in the standard.
Refrigeration and depositor fitters know the plant's quirks, and a customer or rival offering a better title takes them quickly.
Start with the topics that matter most here: Learning and Development; Health, Safety and Wellbeing; Recruitment and Talent Acquisition. Then work through the rest. Each topic is written for manufacturing, not in general.
Training planned from need rather than from the calendar.
Induction, records, incident reporting and follow-through.
Requisition to joining, the same way every time.
How many people, in which roles, by when — and what they will cost.
Structure, reporting lines and who is allowed to decide what.
A first day that is the same for the fifth joiner as the first.
Records, attendance, leave and the day-to-day HR that must simply work.
Salary structure, payroll inputs and a month that closes on time.
Goals, reviews and ratings that hold up in a conversation.
Named backups for the roles that cannot be vacant.
Communication, recognition and the conditions people actually work in.
Two routes — one for complaints, one for conduct — kept separate.
Policies a manager can apply, and obligations with owners and dates.
Who leaves, when, why — and which of them mattered.
Resignation to relieving letter, in a defined order.
Records that survive people, and approvals that do not queue.
A short monthly pack management actually reads.
An HR function that runs the same way every month.
The pieces a chocolate manufacturers business puts in place, in an order that makes each easier. Open any card for the detail.
A short sign-off for each operator on reading temper, checking the cooling curve and handling a bad batch, so judgement is shared.
A short sign-off for each operator on reading temper, checking the cooling curve and handling a bad batch, so judgement is shared. The learning and development process can structure it.
A calendar of temporary headcount by hall, with a one-day induction on weight, seal and hygiene, and a lead hand named for each wrapping line.
A calendar of temporary headcount by hall, with a one-day induction on weight, seal and hygiene, and a lead hand named for each wrapping line. See the recruitment process.
A named person to sign each line clean before a different recipe starts, with a written step list and a record kept with the batch.
A named person to sign each line clean before a different recipe starts, with a written step list and a record kept with the batch.
Time limits, warm clothing issue and rotation between cold and warm areas, with a record of who worked where.
Time limits, warm clothing issue and rotation between cold and warm areas, with a record of who worked where. Fits within a workplace health, safety and wellbeing routine.
A named senior on call for every night conche and mould run, with a simple stop-and-call rule for faulty batches.
A named senior on call for every night conche and mould run, with a simple stop-and-call rule for faulty batches.
A list of who can service the depositor, tempering unit and chillers, with a planned cover person for each, so one resignation does not stop the line.
A list of who can service the depositor, tempering unit and chillers, with a planned cover person for each, so one resignation does not stop the line.
Before changing anything, find out what is true today. These checks take an afternoon and tell you which of the topics above to start with.
Share your requirementsConfirm with a qualified professional. What applies to you depends on your business, your state and your arrangements, and it changes. This page describes practice. It does not state a legal position.
The services below fit this kind of business best. Each starts by recording where you stand, and every later report compares against that. We do not promise outcomes.
Sign-off steps for tempering, allergen changeover and wrapping so skill is not held by two people.
A seasonal hiring plan and a short selection routine for festival crews.
Routines for slips, cold exposure and hygiene records in a sweet, chilled plant.
Rosters for night conching and peak-season overtime that stay fair and recorded.
Start with a free conversation, or see the paid HR Diagnostic.
Understand the business, its workforce, current processes and HR challenges.
Find the missing, weak, inconsistent or person-dependent processes.
Create the structure, processes, policies, SOPs, dashboards and systems needed.
Help HR and department managers actually adopt the new system.
Digitise repetitive and approval-based workflows where it is worth doing.
Track hiring, attendance, employee cost, performance, training and attrition.
Strengthen the people-management system continuously, not once.
From the GullyHR blog: one on HR in manufacturing, and one on each of the topics this page points to.
Why the best operator often struggles as shift supervisor, what it costs the line, and a practical way to choose, prepare and back new supervisors in any kind of plant.
7 min readRead article
A founder's guide to hiring freshers and running a first-year programme: campus or open drives, a screening round, a training plan by quarter, mentors and checkpoints.
6 min readRead article
A shift, weekly and monthly safety routine for rubber plants that names who checks platen guards, mill trip bars, autoclave doors, burst-test cages and slings, and who acts on near misses.
7 min readRead article
How a D2C founder can test a performance marketing hire on real work, ignore weak signals such as dashboard screenshots, and run a fair process.
7 min readRead articleMore on the GullyHR blog.
Write what the best operator does, pair a second person with them and sign each off on a real batch. Recognise the skill in grade and pay so it is worth staying for.
Fix numbers by hall from the order book, book hands early, give a one-day induction and name a lead hand for each line. Plan a few trained returners rather than all new faces.
Name one person per line for sign-off and record the step list with each batch. Confirm with a qualified professional the food safety duties that bind you.
Set time limits, supply suitable clothing and rotate staff. Note who works where, so recurring health complaints can be linked to the task.
Yes, but tell operators in plain words what differs in the standard each time and have a supervisor check the first lot. Confusion at changeover is where mistakes come from.
We would ask who can judge temper, how the festival crew is brought in and who signs allergen changeovers. A good first job is a tempering sign-off scheme plus a seasonal induction. Scope and fee are agreed in writing.
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