CONTROL & AUTOMATION
PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
AUTOMATE
AUTOMATE TO ACCELERATE – WHY FOOD
FIRMS MUST SEIZE THE BREXIT OPPORTUNITY
Automate to
accelerate; robots
produce more
items at a faster
rate and at a higher
level of quality
By Tony McDonald, Sales and Marketing
Director of Ilapak UK
While the use of robotics and automation
in the UK food and drink industry has been
steadily growing over the past decade,
Britain is still lagging behind many of its
international counterparts. As the lowest
G7 nation, UK sits 22nd in the world robot
league table with just 71 robots per 10,000
workers, behind nations such as Slovenia
(137), Sweden (223), and South Korea (631).
This could be about to change, however,
as an unlikely source is set to herald a
long-awaited robot revolution in food
production…
A BREXIT EXODUS
One of the main barriers to greater uptake
of automation, particularly amongst
SMEs, is the cost of unskilled labour
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PECM Issue 35
versus investment in robotics technology.
Thanks to the EU’s free movement of
workers, Britain’s food and drink industry
has benefitted from cheap labour for a
number of years – in fact, it employs the
highest share of EU migrant workers (30 per
cent) compared with any other UK sector,
employing around one fifth of the two
million EU nationals working in Britain. This
figure is at its highest on fruit and vegetable
farms, where 99 per cent of workers come
from Eastern Europe.
But Brexit is set to change the labour
landscape in just a few short years. The
Food and Drink Federation (FDF) reported
that 47 per cent of companies in Britain’s
food supply chain said their EU workers
were considering their future as a direct
result of the June 2016 Brexit vote. On
farms the impact is starker still – according
to the National Farmers’ Union, in the
crucial harvest month of September 2017,
29 per cent of roles went unfilled, the first
shortfall since records began back in 2014.
Brexit, combined with a skills shortage
brought about an ageing domestic
workforce and a lack of British young
people coming into the industry – not to
mention the 2020 deadline for the new
National Minimum Wage – is giving the
UK’s food and drink businesses a staffing
dilemma. Faced with an impending lack of
cheap labour, many are turning to robots to
fill the gap.