Cranswick Is Running a 3.5-Year Manufacturing Degree Apprenticeship, and the Real Salary Is Higher Than Our Own Database First Showed
Our listing for this apprenticeship showed "National Minimum Wage" as the salary. The actual GOV.UK vacancy page states £16,640 to £26,436.80 a year depending on age — a meaningfully more specific figure, and one worth knowing before you assume this is a minimum-wage role. This is a reminder that a single scraped field can lag the primary source, and why we always tell you to check the original listing before applying, not just our summary of it.
What is open today
- Food Manufacturing Operations Degree Apprenticeship, reference VAC2000051163, with sites across Barnsley, Hull, Leeds and Malton. £16,640–£26,436.80 a year depending on age. Apply through your GOV.UK Find an Apprenticeship account.
The actual structure
This is a Level 6 Manufacturing Manager Degree Apprenticeship, delivered with the University of Lincoln over 3.5 years, leading to a BSc-equivalent qualification in food manufacturing management. Entry requirements are GCSE English and Maths at grade 4 or above, plus any A-level at grade C or above (or equivalent) — a lower and less prescriptive bar than most of the finance and banking apprenticeships we have covered.
The shift pattern is stated as 4-on-4-off, typically 6am to 6pm — a genuine detail worth knowing before you apply, since it is a meaningfully different working pattern from an office-based degree apprenticeship. Cranswick states permanent employment is guaranteed on completion, with progression toward supervisory and management roles in operations.
Cranswick's own marketing claims degree apprentices start on average 45% above the national apprenticeship wage across its schemes — that is a company figure, not independently audited, so read it as Cranswick's own claim rather than a verified external stat.
What Cranswick actually is
Cranswick is a FTSE 250 food producer headquartered in Hull, with roughly 16,000 employees and 23 UK production sites, supplying fresh pork, poultry, sausages and cooked meats to Tesco, Asda, Aldi and Marks & Spencer, among others, and managing around a million pigs across more than 500 farms. If "food manufacturing" sounds abstract, this is the scale it operates at — a genuinely large UK industrial employer that most people have never heard of despite eating its products regularly.
What we could not confirm
No public source states an applicants-per-place figure for this apprenticeship, and Cranswick's site does not describe the application process beyond the GOV.UK portal itself — no confirmed number of interview or assessment stages. Apply via the listed contact, Sam Foster at Cranswick, if you have process questions the listing does not answer.
What to actually do
- Check the live GOV.UK listing directly before applying — as this article demonstrates, scraped salary and location fields can lag the source by weeks.
- Think honestly about the shift pattern. 4-on-4-off suits some people and genuinely does not suit others — decide that before you are three weeks into an application process, not after an offer.
- Do not dismiss this as "just" a minimum-wage role. The real band tops out above £26,000, and the entry bar is lower than most Level 6 routes we cover.
- If food, agriculture or manufacturing genuinely interests you, this is a rare degree apprenticeship in a sector most school careers advice does not mention. Compare it against what else is open.
The part that matters
Most of the degree apprenticeships that get talked about in careers assemblies are banking, law or consulting. Cranswick is none of those, and it is also a FTSE 250 company running a proper university-backed degree route into a genuinely large UK industry that quietly employs thousands of people. It will not come up unprompted. That is exactly why it is worth fourteen minutes of your attention now.
ApprenticeWizard tracks every live apprenticeship and internship in the UK in one place, filterable by level, with a free application tracker so you never lose a deadline. Details in this article were taken from our database and Cranswick's/GOV.UK's listings on 3 September 2026. See everything else open right now.