Automate to accelerate –
why food firms must seize the Brexit opportunity
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,
16
is the cost of unskilled labour 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.
www.ilapak.co.uk