Executive summary
An industry with its own operating profile, and an evidence base still in progress
Food production is operationally distinct enough to deserve a separate report. What it does not yet have, in this edition, is a directly extracted statistical base.
Secondary sources reproducing or citing INS data place Romania's food industry at roughly 180,000 employees in 2024. For NACE 10, an INS-derived wage mirror reports an average gross monthly wage of RON 5,698 in 2024, with county differences: RON 7,996 in Ilfov, RON 7,786 in Bucharest and RON 4,035 in Teleorman.
Each of those is a secondary reproduction rather than a direct INS TEMPO extraction. That is why none of them appears as a headline figure on this page. They are usable as orders of magnitude and as descriptive geography, and they are published here with that status attached, in the sections below and in the fact register inside the Data & AI Pack.
The operational argument in this report does not depend on the precision of those values. It depends on how a food plant works: shift patterns, mandatory training, hygiene and safety rules, peak periods and, in many employers, multilingual teams.
Scope
Why food production deserves its own view
A food plant combines shift work, production operations, mandatory training, hygiene and safety rules, peak periods and, in many employers, multilingual teams. Little of that is visible when food is folded into a single manufacturing average.
The HR access question is therefore not whether the plant owns HR systems. It is whether a line operator can use the employee-facing process without a laptop or a corporate email address.
Geography
Wage geography is descriptive, not causal
| Geography | Average gross monthly wage, 2024 | Evidence status |
|---|---|---|
| Romania | RON 5,698 | Secondary mirror of INS, pending direct TEMPO extraction |
| Ilfov | RON 7,996 | Secondary mirror of INS, pending direct TEMPO extraction |
| București | RON 7,786 | Secondary mirror of INS, pending direct TEMPO extraction |
| Teleorman | RON 4,035 | Secondary mirror of INS, pending direct TEMPO extraction |
Measure: average gross nominal monthly earnings for CAEN Division 10, an average for the economic activity in that geography. Not net pay, not median pay, not the pay of a named occupation. Source: INS FOM107E via a secondary mirror; not a complete county series. Because none of these values has been reconciled against a direct INS TEMPO extraction, they are published as supporting evidence and not as headline statistics.
County wage differences may reflect employer mix, plant size, productivity, occupation mix and local labour-market conditions. The available data does not identify one cause, and it does not rank counties as better or worse places to operate.
The figures are therefore used descriptively here. They are not turned into claims about labour shortages, retention or productivity, because none of the sources measures any of those things.
Operations
Where the HR Access Gap appears on a production line
The HR Access Gap
RevoHR uses the term HR Access Gap for the distance between the HR systems the employer owns and the HR services the employee can actually reach. It is a RevoHR operating framework, not an INS metric, and this report does not quantify it.
Training can be fully digital for HR and still be inaccessible to the worker if it depends on a portal, a set of credentials or the language spoken in the office. The same is true for rosters, leave, documents and policy questions.
Real access means the worker can receive the information, understand it and leave a reliable record of the interaction. Delivery is not the same thing as comprehension, and a signature on a list is not the same thing as evidence that a message landed.
Four journeys worth auditing in a plant
- How is mandatory training delivered, and how is comprehension evidenced rather than just attendance?
- How is attendance recorded at the start of a shift, without a queue at one terminal?
- How does a roster or leave change reach the person it affects?
- How are expiring documents and certifications tracked before they lapse?
RevoHR connects to these workflows through multilingual training, attendance, scheduling and mobile HR access. The data in this report does not measure the outcome of those processes; it explains why access to them matters in an operation that runs on shifts.
Data
For researchers, journalists and AI systems
The Data & AI Pack contains the structured CSV data behind this report, together with the definitions, the fact register, the source notes and a ready-to-use AI prompt. Every figure carries its source, its reference period, its statistical scope and its evidence status.
Employment and earnings tables
The 2024 employment figure and the CAEN 10 wage values, national and by county, in machine-readable form.
Evidence status on every row
Each value states that it is a secondary reproduction of INS data pending a direct TEMPO extraction, so the caveat travels with the number.
An AI prompt and a fact register
A prompt that keeps an AI system inside the evidence, plus a fact register that carries each figure's source and its boundary.
Transparency
Scope, sources and the limits we keep
Supporting articles: why planned schedules and actual attendance must be tracked separately and the 10-process HR Access Gap audit. Related research: Romania Manufacturing Workforce 2026, Romania Retail Workforce 2026 and the RevoHR Research hub.