Food Processing Workers, All Other

Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier. Trimming irregular carcasses, hand-sorting soft fruit and mixing small artisan batches still defeat off-the-shelf machinery, but the weighing, checkweighing, labeling and palletizing portions of your shift are already done by machines in high-volume plants — that split of genuinely hard manual work against demonstrably automated tasks is what puts this at 13 rather than the high teens a butcher-level knife job would earn.

Hands-on in uncontrolled environments. You work standing on wet floors in coolers and cook rooms, hauling totes, reaching into hoppers, breaking down and scrubbing equipment after shift — physical and awkward, but inside a fixed plant with defined stations and conveyor lines, not a farm field or a construction site, which caps it at 13 instead of the high-teens uncontrolled-environment band.

No licence, no signature requirement. No state licence stands between you and a machine: food-handler cards and HACCP awareness training run days, not years, and when a lot is contaminated the recall and the FDA/FSIS citation land on the plant and its QA manager, not on the person who logged the cooler temperature.

Anonymous artifact production. Nobody buying the retail pack knows your name, the line you ran, or the shift you worked; the brand and the USDA mark carry the customer relationship entirely.

Executes defined procedures on defined inputs. Your calls are bounded by written specs — trim to the fat spec, hold the CCP at temperature, reject product outside the grade sheet, flag the deviation to a supervisor — real skill in execution but the escalation path and the corrective action are written down for you, which is a 4 rather than the 8-plus a QA technician who signs off on lot disposition would carry.