I’ve been in the food industry long enough to know that the hardest problems rarely announce themselves. They tend to show up quietly — in a hire that didn’t stick, a team that couldn’t execute, a leader who looked great on paper but couldn’t navigate the culture. Which is why, when I sat down recently with Ron Torch, CEO and co-founder of Torch Group, I was less interested in his résumé than in how he thinks about the problem of talent itself.
Ron came to foodservice the way many of us did — sideways. After an unplanned interview with Durkee Food Service early in his career, he found himself building expertise in an industry he hadn’t set out to join. He eventually launched Torch Group as a marketing consultancy, intent on bringing what he calls “big M” marketing — genuine strategy and brand positioning — to an industry he felt was stuck in the tactical weeds. What happened next is a familiar story for entrepreneurs: a client needed something different, and Ron adapted.
A dot-com era client flush with venture capital needed to build an entire marketing department from scratch — twelve hires in short order. Ron joined with his partner Michele, whose background sits squarely in HR and talent acquisition, and they delivered. Before the ink was dry, a second company came calling with the same request. Torch Group had a new direction.
Beyond the Resume
More than thirty years and 1,300-plus placements later, what distinguishes The Torch Group isn’t volume — it’s methodology. Ron is direct about this: most search firms optimize for activity. His firm optimizes for fit. That distinction drives everything about how they operate.
At the heart of their process is what they call competency-based behavioral interviewing. Michele develops custom questions for each search — not generic assessments, but probes designed to surface how a candidate has actually behaved in past situations analogous to what the client will ask of them. It’s a rigorous methodology built on a simple premise: past behavior is your best predictor of future performance.
Then there’s the reference check process, which is where things get genuinely interesting. Torch Group doesn’t just call the names a candidate hands them. They conduct an in-depth interview and deliver comprehensive reference reports with strengths, developmental needs and performance expectations. In an industry where every reference sounds like a recommendation letter, this kind of due diligence is worth its weight.
The result is a smaller, selective candidate pool — fewer names, but each one backed by a clear rationale. Diane Beecher, CEO of The Brand Consultancy, put it this way: Torch Group has delivered more qualified candidates than any other search firm I’ve worked with across my thirty-five year career.
That’s not a throwaway line. That’s a benchmark.
The Hardest Part Is Alignment
I asked Ron what keeps him up at night, and his answer was refreshingly candid: The challenge of calibrating expectations before a search begins. He’s seen it play out multiple times. HR wants one thing, the hiring manager wants another, and the CEO is operating from a completely different mental model of the role. Meanwhile, the compensation package is priced for 2018, and the job description reads like a wish list rather than a real job.
“The biggest challenge is aligning client expectations,” Ron told me, noting that misaligned position requirements and unrealistic and narrow experience and backgrounds are where searches most commonly break down. His response to this isn’t to simply accept the brief and start sourcing — it’s to act as a strategic partner, helping clients reframe roles to match market realities before research and the first candidate outreach happens. That kind of consultative approach is rarer than it should be.
What Technology Can’t Replace
Like every corner of the industry, executive recruiting has been reshaped by digital tools. Ron remembers the days of Harris InfoSource books and handwritten notes. Today it’s LinkedIn, AI, and CRM platforms. He’s adapted, but he holds a firm line on one point: for senior, mission-critical roles, the human element of deep, one-on-one interviewing is irreplaceable. Algorithms are excellent at pattern-matching credentials. They are not good at reading a room, detecting a values mismatch, or sensing the subtle things that determine whether a leader will actually thrive in a particular culture. That’s still a human job.
If you’re a food industry company navigating a critical hire — whether you’re building a team, replacing a departing leader, or stepping into a new phase of growth — the conversation Ron and I had is worth having with him directly. Torch Group’s track record speaks for itself, but what struck me most was something harder to quantify: the way Ron and Michele think about talent as a strategic question, not a transactional one. That perspective is increasingly rare, and in a people-driven industry like ours, it matters.
Learn more at www.torchgroup.com.
