[BinaryIdiot]

> I'll echo the GP post - I'm a bit surprised at the amount of surprise. Maybe we need to be doing a better job of educating people about these things (or conversely, maybe we need to do a better job of sticking our heads outside our respective bubbles).

I get everything you're saying and as I said I am not in the same industry but I've taken cursory looks and 2,000 still seems high to me. But I'm not saying they're doing it wrong and I have to be right, etc; I would just love a breakdown to get an idea for how they manage / use so many employees.

For instance Nabisco has a large factory that has 1,200 employees that handles the making, packaging and shipping out of about 320 million pounds of snack food a year. Granted they're a crazy huge company so not comparable but it shows what 1,200 people can do to some degree in food manufacturing but obviously there are huge differences there. It's hard to find a company of similar market size that I actually know of to compare employee counts.

Do you have any references for employee utilization / counts at various food manufacturers / distributors?

[CydeWeys]

You're comparing employment at a single factory to employment at an entire company, though. There are lots of jobs at Chobani that aren't factory jobs. And Nabisco has a much higher total employment count as well.

I too would love to see a breakdown of exactly how big each department of a given company is. I have no reason to suspect that they employ significantly more people than necessary though; the profit motive gives good reason to avoid doing that.