Last month, we co-hosted Automation Unleashed: Powering the Next Era of Food and Drink Manufacturing with the Manufacturing Technology Centre at MTC’s facility in Coventry, bringing together senior executives for a leadership forum combining keynote presentations, panel discussion and guided tours of MTC’s automation and robotics labs.
The UK’s food and drink industry faces mounting pressure: sustained cost inflation, persistent labour shortages, volatile markets and falling business confidence. The central message from the day was clear: automation is no longer simply an efficiency lever, it is a question of resilience, continuity and long-term competitiveness. The technology is there, the case is clear. The question is why so few manufacturers have moved from intention to impact, and what it actually takes to change that.
Here are our key takeaways from the discussion:
- Start with the problem, not the technology: define the desired outcome first, whether that is reduced waste, improved line reliability or a specific throughput constraint. Automation chosen because a competitor has invested, or a vendor has presented compellingly, rarely delivers consistent value
- Build a business case that reflects full value, and that finance will believe: labour savings alone are commercially narrow and strategically fragile. The robust case captures quality, yield, capacity, safety and the cost of not automating. The question is commercial risk, payback certainty and what happens when assumptions shift
- Targeted automation often beats full automation: short runs, format changes and retailer-driven variety mean full-line automation is not always the right answer. Knowing where not to automate is as important as knowing where to start
- Treat pre-work as insurance, not overhead: simulation and feasibility studies are easy to cut when timelines tighten. Manufacturers that invest in understanding end-to-end impact, including where new bottlenecks will emerge, encounter fewer expensive surprises at deployment
- Scaling requires organisational alignment, not just operational readiness: automation programmes fail not in the factory but in the meeting room. Cross-functional ownership across operations, engineering, finance, procurement, HR and IT must be genuine, with red lines agreed early and remembered late
- Workforce transition is a design requirement, not an afterthought: confidence in new technology must be built progressively at every level. With the workforce ageing and the industry competing for younger talent, automation that removes physically arduous work is also part of a longer-term case for making food and drink manufacturing an attractive place to build a career
The UK food and drink industry does not have a technology problem. It does not have a strategy problem. What it has is an execution problem, and it is a harder one to solve than it looks.
The manufacturers that break that pattern are not necessarily those with the biggest capital budgets. They are the ones that do the harder work: building cases that capture full commercial value, designing automation as an integrated system, aligning their organisations before they deploy, and treating the workforce transition as central rather than incidental.
Get it right, and automation unlocks the productivity, resilience and sustainable growth that isolated pilots will never deliver.
The technology is ready. Now the work needs to focus on making sure the organisation is too.
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