How Wholestone Farms Built a Foundation of Food Safety Culture Training
Wholestone Farms was founded in 2018 by American farmers in Fremont, Nebraska. To this day, it is 100% farmer-owned and vertically integrated from farm to kitchen, producing pork for customers around the world.
For a company with strong local ties, pride, and global impact, Wholestone needed to address issues stemming from a previous acquisition and rebuild its L&D programs from scratch.
The Challenges
Need to Drive Performance: Like many food manufacturers, Wholestone operates with tight margins and high demand, requiring quick action to improve performance and succeed.
Retiring Workforce: Meanwhile, with many long-term employees approaching retirement, there was an urgent need to retain and transfer institutional knowledge and address succession-planning gaps.
Inexperienced Talent Pool: Additionally, the local workforce lacked enough experienced candidates with the required skill sets. Language barriers also created challenges during hiring and training.
“When we started focusing on training, we had a 25% drop in our turnover rate. We’re doing a great job of showing our employees we’re invested in them and making sure they have the tools they need.”
Grant Prenzlow
HR Director, Wholestone Farms
The Solution
Compliance: Everything starts with safety. As the foundation of Wholestone’s food safety culture training, the number one priority was ensuring compliance with safety regulations, particularly for OSHA audit readiness. The company achieved this through consistent safety training, detailed training records, and proactive management of training needs, all through the WorkForge LMS.
Competency: Next, Wholestone implemented a structured three-step training process using the WorkForge LMS: classroom learning, engagement quizzes, and on-the-job competency assessments to ensure skills retention. This upskilled employees while preserving institutional knowledge and bridging the gap between retiring workers and new hires. LMS data also provided competency validation and actionable insights for leadership.
Culture: Consistent investment in employee development fostered a positive, supportive work environment while creating clear career advancement opportunities through WorkForge Pathways. Ultimately, this resulted in reduced turnover, boosted morale, and increased productivity, reinforcing Wholestone’s commitment to its workforce.
Gaining Executive Buy-In
To do this, the Wholestone HR team needed to work strategically to gain support from leadership:
| Inputs to Gain Buy-In | Results and Impact |
|---|---|
| Linked training to career growth, addressing turnover, rising production demands, and audit challenges | Lower turnover, stronger brand protection, and improved profit margins through workforce development |
| Leveraged WorkForge LMS data to quantify training’s effectiveness | Clear impact on productivity, quality, and safety, reinforcing the cost of inaction from poor training |
| Demonstrated how highly-trained employees directly improve product quality | Executive commitment to long-term workforce development, ensuring sustained business success |
“We decided to make a great investment in WorkForge’s LMS to help us produce the data we needed in order to drive numbers against our critical topics like reducing our turnover and hiring challenges. It made it super, super simple.”
Grant Prenzlow
HR Director, Wholestone Farms
Key Recommendations for Starting to Build a Successful Training Program
1. Establish the “Why” Behind Training.
Aligning learning goals with organizational priorities creates a clear framework for measuring the impact of HR strategy. Targeted training can then address a wide range of workforce challenges, including high turnover, hiring difficulties, long time-to-productivity, limited workforce data, and time constraints.
2. Partner with an Experienced LMS Provider.
With WorkForge’s LMS, organizations can efficiently deliver training, automate tracking and reporting, and turn workforce data into meaningful insights. This enables leaders to measure training effectiveness and demonstrate return on investment (ROI).
3. Commit and Strive for Continuous Improvement.
Starting with a basic skills matrix focused on essential skills and building on it over time demonstrates a commitment to employee growth. From there, developing a comprehensive training program reinforces a culture of continuous learning and supports measurable business results.
Looking ahead
Wholestone Farms’ investment in a structured, data-driven training program turned a post-acquisition rebuild into a lasting culture of continuous improvement. As a result, cutting turnover in half, tripled training engagement, and gave leadership the data to keep investing in their workforce long-term.
Ready to build your own food safety culture training program? Book a demo with our team today.
