Food production is one of the most demanding environments for workforce management. You’re running 24/7 shift patterns, managing rotating teams, dealing with strict hygiene standards, and facing food safety requirements that demand you know exactly who was on site — and when.
A basic time and attendance system won’t cut it. You need something built to handle the complexity of your operation: from early-morning starts and night shifts to temporary workers during peak periods, and payroll rules that actually reflect how your people work.
Egress Systems has been helping food manufacturers get this right for decades. Our cloud-based Focus.net platform is used by production sites across the UK — and it’s designed to work the way you do.
Key Challenges
Workforce Management Challenges in Food Production.
Hygiene and Contamination Risk
Traditional swipe cards and proximity fobs can harbour bacteria and become a hygiene liability in food-safe environments. Clocking needs to be contactless — without sacrificing accuracy.
Wash-Down Environments
Your production floor gets wet. Terminals need to survive regular cleaning and wash-down without failing. Consumer-grade hardware simply isn’t built for it.
Shift Complexity and Rotating Patterns
Early shifts, night shifts, rotating rotas, split breaks — calculating pay correctly from complex shift rules is time-consuming and error-prone when done manually.
Traceability and Food Safety Compliance
During a product recall or audit, you need to prove who was on site during any given production run. That data has to be accurate, retrievable, and audit-ready.
Temporary and Agency Workers
Peak periods bring influxes of agency staff. You need to track hours, manage skills and qualifications, and feed accurate data to payroll — regardless of employment type.
Labour Cost Visibility
With multiple shifts, production lines, and departments running simultaneously, understanding where your wage spend is actually going can be surprisingly difficult without the right tools in place.
How We Help
How Focus.net supports food production
Hygiene-Safe, Industrial-Grade Clocking
Our biometric face recognition terminals operate in fully contactless mode — no touching, no cards, no fobs. For wash-down and clean areas, our fingerprint terminals carry an IP65/IP67 rating, suitable for wet and regularly sanitised environments.
Shift & Rota Management
Focus.net handles fixed, flexible, rotating, and 24/7 shift patterns. Use the Drafting Bench to build and manage rotas with drag-and-drop simplicity, with skills matching to ensure the right people — forklift operators, first aiders, qualified technicians — are always on the right shift.
- Rotating and night shift patterns
- Bespoke shift rules and complex overtime calculations
- Skills and qualifications tracking per employee
Labour Cost Control
Capture labour costs by department or production line using cost centre allocation. Understand exactly where your wage spend is going — by shift, by line, by period. Real-time dashboards give managers instant visibility without waiting for end-of-week reports.
Payroll Accuracy
Remove the burden of manual timesheet reconciliation. Focus.net delivers accurate, fully calculated hours, overtime, and absence data in a format that’s ready to use in your payroll workflows.
Traceability and Food Safety Records
Focus.net maintains a complete, searchable record of who was on site and when — valuable for food safety audits, product traceability requirements, and internal reporting.
Absence and Compliance Management
Track holidays, sickness, and Bradford Factor scores. Get alerts when absence patterns emerge. Manage holiday requests through the employee self-service app — without the spreadsheets.
Key Benefits
Contact free face recognition
Waterproof terminals suitable for wash-down areas
Easily manage rosters or reoccuring shift patterns
Manage labour costs
Define bespoke shift rules
Automatically record attendance bonuses
Integrate with access control
Manage sickness and absence
Trusted by Food Manufacturers
Egress Systems works with food manufacturers across the UK, including Inspired Global Cuisine — an innovative producer of ready meals, soups, and sauces for UK and international markets. They use Focus.net to manage their workforce, track attendance, and meet the demands of a fast-moving production environment.
Many of our customers in food production have been with us for over ten years. That kind of relationship only happens when the system works — and when the support behind it does too.
Built For The Food Production Environment
- IP65/IP67-rated terminals — designed for wet areas, clean rooms, and wash-down environments
- Contactless biometric clocking — eliminates shared touch points and contamination risk
- Full attendance audit trail — supports food safety traceability and internal audits
- Fire muster and live roll call — real-time reporting for site safety and emergency planning
- Multi-site capability — manage multiple production facilities from one platform
- Skills and qualifications management — ensure staffing compliance on every shift
Whether you’re replacing an outdated system or implementing time and attendance for the first time, we’ll help you find the right solution — and get it working properly from day one.