The buyer question
We need to hire senior leadership for an agri-food operation in Forlì or the surrounding province - plant and automation responsibility, quality and food-safety direction, or export commercial leadership. What does the verified record say about this market, and how should a mandate here be structured?
What the public record shows
Forlì-Cesena is an agricultural province inside Italy's leading agri-food export region. Emilia-Romagna's agri-food exports exceeded €11.5 billion in 2025, up 9.7%, and reached €5.8 billion in the first half of 2026 - 16.3% of the national total, ahead of Lombardy and Piedmont - with 46 PDO and PGI productions worth close to €4 billion and more than 4,400 active food-and-drink firms, according to the Rapporto agroalimentare 2025 published by the region with Unioncamere in September 2026.
Within that region, the province's own weight is agricultural. At 31 December 2025 the province had 5,677 active agricultural firms - 16.1% of all its active firms, against 12.8% regionally and 13.3% nationally - and agriculture employs 13.6% of the province's business employees against a 5.7% regional share, generating 4.2% of its value added. The Chamber of Commerce's preliminary estimate puts 2025 agricultural production value at €545 million, up 12.9% on the Chamber's own 2024 base - its year-earlier report had put 2024 at €497.4 million - with fruit crops the second-largest component at 22.1% behind livestock.
The fruit economy is the province's signature. Pesca e Nettarina di Romagna IGP - among the first Italian IGPs when it was recognised in 2002 - is produced across the whole province of Forlì-Cesena, in Ravenna's, and in parts of Ferrara, Bologna and Rimini; its consortium of nine member companies certified more than 1,100 hectares and commercialised 3,000 tonnes in the 2024 season, with Germany among its key export destinations. The regional peach-and-nectarine offer ran at roughly 172,000 tonnes in the 2026 campaign, 121,000 of them nectarines, in trade-press figures. Cesena organises Macfrut, the international fruit-and-vegetable fair run by Cesena Fiera at the Rimini Expo Centre, and the city's wholesale fruit-and-vegetable market at Pievesestina di Cesena is operated by Filiera Ortofrutticola Romagnola, wholly owned by the Comune di Cesena.
The employer base at packing and processing scale is cooperative, and the record corrects two common misplacements. Agrintesa - one of Italy's principal fruit-and-vegetable cooperatives, operating across Forlì-Cesena and Ravenna - has its registered and administrative seat in Faenza, in Ravenna province: 4,000 member farms, 18,500 cultivated hectares, 2,300-plus employees and a consolidated production value of €450 million, with 2023 registry revenue of €311.5 million. Apo Conerpo, the producer organisation that describes itself as holding European leadership in fresh fruit and vegetables, is seated at Villanova di Castenaso in Bologna's province: 6,000 producers in 50 cooperatives, more than one million tonnes marketed a year, 91 processing facilities and 190 technicians. Both sit inside the province's daily recruiting radius - and neither is a Forlì-headquartered corporate.
The specialist pipeline is documented at Cesena rather than Forlì. The University of Bologna teaches its food-science degrees - the three-year Tecnologie Alimentari and the laurea magistrale in Scienze e tecnologie alimentari - at its Cesena campus, and the Tecnopolo di Forlì-Cesena, part of the Emilia-Romagna High Technology Network, hosts its agro-food research, the CIRI Agroalimentare centre, at the Cesena site. No public record states how many graduates those programmes produce each year or how many stay in the local sector.
What the demand side looks like is structural. The region's unemployment rate was 4.3% in 2024 and 4.1% in 2025 - among Italy's lowest, against a national rate above 6% - and the employers named above recruit the dual-profile roles this market is known for: Agrintesa's own production-responsibility postings ask for a degree in engineering or food technologies. What no public series provides is vacancy durations for Forlì-Cesena food roles, passive-candidate ratios, salary bands, or the premium percentages this market is often quoted at.
Two risks on the record are climate and succession. The May 2023 floods hit 7,500 hectares of peach and nectarine crops in the affected communes - over 90% of the region's production - together with close to 45% of the region's fruit-and-vegetable area, nearly 80,000 hectares, and more than 41,000 workers were concerned; a second flood struck in September 2024, and the Chamber of Commerce attributes the province's 7.2% fall in utilised agricultural area to those two events. Italy's 2023 peach production fell 10%, with the Romagna flood among the causes. On succession, the same Chamber of Commerce record counts under-30s in 2.5% of agricultural firms' company positions while 29.3% are held by people over 69 - a generational split the report itself flags.
What changes in this market
A Forlì-Cesena mandate competes inside the strongest agri-food export region in the country, but at provincial scale the employers are cooperative supply-chain operators and small manufacturing firms - average firm size of 11 employees in the province's manufacturing and 4 in its agriculture at the Chamber of Commerce's 2024 records - rather than corporate headquarters. The roles that matter sit at skill intersections the record can see but not count: production responsibility that spans engineering and food technology, quality and food-safety direction, and export commercial leadership into Northern Europe. The verified structural risks - flood-exposed supply, a generation holding nearly a third of firm positions beyond the age of 69, and a regional labour market at 4.1% unemployment - are permanent features of the mandate, not cycle timing. Because no public provincial vacancy, salary or availability series exists, calibration evidence has to come from mandates actually run, not from market statistics.
KiTalent's mandate analysis
- Define the operating mandate before the market scan: plant and automation responsibility, quality and food-safety direction, and export commercial leadership certify differently and draw on different segments of a regional pool.
- Screen on verified work inside the documented structure: cooperative fruit and vegetable supply chains, IGP programmes, the wholesale-market and trade-fair infrastructure around Cesena, and the province's small manufacturing base.
- Treat the pool as regional: Faenza, Cesena, Ravenna, Bologna and Rimini are all inside the documented operating radius - a search that stops at the province boundary excludes the employers the record actually names.
- Anchor compensation in mandates, not quoted series: no public salary-band or premium series exists for Forlì-Cesena agri-food roles, so offers are calibrated from comparable searches rather than quoted premiums.
- Weight the verified risks: flood-exposed raw-material supply, the 2.5%-under-30 and 29.3%-over-69 generational split in agricultural firms' positions, and a 4.1% regional unemployment rate all belong in the brief from the start.
- Expect specialist reach to be earned through direct mapping - the working assumption of every mandate KiTalent runs here.
Where the public record stops
Claims beyond the dated public record are not repeated on this page. The verified record above - the €11.5 billion regional agri-food export year of 2025 and the €5.8 billion first half of 2026, the 5,677 agricultural firms and 4.2% value-added share at 31 December 2025, the €545 million preliminary production value, the IGP's 1,100 certified hectares and 3,000-tonne 2024 season, Agrintesa's and Apo Conerpo's published profiles, the Cesena-campus food-science degrees, the May 2023 and September 2024 floods, and the 2.5% and 29.3% generational split - supports the structural argument without invented vacancy, salary, passive-candidate, capital-expenditure or unfilled-position statistics.
Sources
- Camera di Commercio della Romagna - Il settore Agricoltura nelle province di Forlì-Cesena e di Rimini
- Camera di Commercio della Romagna - Il settore Manifatturiero nelle province di Forlì-Cesena e Rimini
- Regione Emilia-Romagna - Pesca e Nettarina di Romagna IGP (12 June 2025)
- Rapporto agroalimentare 2025, Regione Emilia-Romagna with Unioncamere (reported by Forlì24ore, 25 September 2026)
- Regione Emilia-Romagna - flood damage survey, comunicato of 1 June 2023
- Regione Emilia-Romagna / Centro servizi ortofrutticoli - I danni nel settore ortofrutta, June 2023 annex (7,500-hectare figure)
- Il Sole 24 Ore - La produzione di pesche diminuisce 10%, 25 July 2023 (national 2023 output)
- Agrintesa - Chi siamo
- Apo Conerpo - Azienda
- Italmercati - Mercato Ortofrutticolo di Cesena
- Università di Bologna - Scienze e tecnologie alimentari (LM-70, Cesena)
- Tecnopolo di Forlì-Cesena - laboratories
- Statistica Regione Emilia-Romagna - Il mercato del lavoro in Emilia-Romagna nel 2025
- Italiafruit - Pesca e nettarina di Romagna IGP, 2026 campaign (trade press)
- Macfrut - Cesena Fiera at the Rimini Expo Centre
Related KiTalent research
- The Market Map Is Not the Shortlist: helps a buyer decide whether a Forlì-Cesena agri-food mandate is really a plant, quality or export-commercial leadership search, and how to test it against the documented cooperative structure
- How to Assess a Leader Beyond Competencies: shows how to gather decisional evidence for this mandate - the research method behind documentary screening of production, quality and export leadership work
Related Links
- Forlì
- Italy
- Industrial Manufacturing
- Milan Professional Services: Define the Practice and Delivery Mandate
- Milan Financial Services: Define the Regulated Business Mandate
- Milan Fashion Hiring: Separate Brand, Industrial and Supply-Chain Leadership
- Quebec City's Insurance Sector Cut Hundreds of Jobs and Still Cannot Hire the People It Needs
Related Market Reads
Articles tied to the same hiring geography or market context.
Milan Professional Services: Define the Practice and Delivery Mandate
How should a Milan professional-services firm define a mandate across regulated assurance, advisory, legal practice, data delivery and partnership economics?
Milan Financial Services: Define the Regulated Business Mandate
Which regulated entity, product, control function and decision rights define a Milan financial-services mandate?
Milan Fashion Hiring: Separate Brand, Industrial and Supply-Chain Leadership
How should a Milan fashion mandate distinguish brand-headquarters leadership from industrial and supply-chain capability?
Nearby Market Signals
Lateral reads from adjacent cities, sectors, or themes.
Quebec City's Insurance Sector Cut Hundreds of Jobs and Still Cannot Hire the People It Needs
Quebec City's two largest insurers eliminated 450 administrative positions over a two year integration cycle. The headlines told a story of contraction. The recruitment data...
Los Angeles Entertainment Hiring: Define the Mandate Before the Search
Which studio-production, games-and-interactive or music-and-recording responsibility actually defines an LA entertainment mandate?
Dallas Telecom and Digital Infrastructure: Define the Network Mandate
Which network, facility or deployment decisions define the Dallas telecom and digital-infrastructure mandate?
From the Archive
Evergreen background reading that still sharpens current hiring decisions.
Varese Aerospace Hiring: Define the Mandate Before the Search
Which helicopter-programmes, trainer-aircraft or supplier responsibility actually defines a Varese aerospace mandate?
Turin's Aerospace Sector Is Investing Hundreds of Millions in New Facilities. It Cannot Find the Engineers to Staff Them.
Turin's three largest aerospace employers have committed €340 million in facility expansions between 2024 and 2026. New cleanrooms. New additive manufacturing centres. New...
Treviso Appliance Manufacturing Hiring: Define the Mandate Before the Search
What the verified public record establishes about Treviso's headquartered-brand economy, the De'Longhi appliance anchor founded in 1902, and where a mandate needs contacted, assessed and validated candidates.
