Torani, a San Francisco-based drink flavoring company and certified B corporation, has increased its efforts over the last five years to increase the number of women in frontline positions. The company has seen a five-fold uptick of women in manufacturing roles thanks to automation, upskilling roles, and a dedicated focus on increasing diversity.
Now, nearly 28 percent of the company’s manufacturing team is made up of women. Torani is also majority owned by women, led by a female CEO, has a senior team consisting of 46 percent women, and is determined to keep growing the number of women in its manufacturing roles.
“Women are now playing key roles in every department and at every level within the organization. We believe incredible value comes from having a range of backgrounds and perspectives at the table,” said Becca Russell, Torani’s chief of people and opportunity development, in a statement. “Even a company as progressive as Torani, that has been deeply dedicated to creating opportunities for all, must challenge ourselves to take a step back and assess where there isn’t equal access to opportunity. Minimizing work that required brute strength was one step forward, and there is still more to do to remove barriers for all to succeed.”
As of August of this year, 49 million women are in the U.S. workforce, a slight increase from February 2020, before the pandemic started, according to a statement from the company. In industries like manufacturing, however, the road to closing the gender gap has gotten even longer, with women making up around 47 percent of the total workforce nationwide, but holding less than 30 percent of manufacturing roles across the industry.
Torani seeks to challenge this disparity by leveraging technology to increase accessibility for women. For example, previously, empty bottles from the production line needed to be manually fed into a machine to be loaded, but now the bottles are automatically fed. This type of reduction in manual labor has enabled the workflows to become automated, which enabled the hiring of more women into manufacturing positions.
In time for national manufacturing week, which occurs between October 7 to 14, the company reported that it has increased women in frontline manufacturing positions by 625 percent over the last five years.
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