BARA: Food and Beverage Sector Embraces Robot Technology

The Food and Beverage sector is the largest adopter of industry robots since the UK went into lockdown in March 2020.

The results of the regular quarterly survey, undertaken by BARA, for the period April and June 2020 confirmed that the Food and Beverage sector accounted for no less than 29% of all industrial robots sold in the UK; almost three times more than the next highest: the pharma, healthcare and medical sector.

Moreover, while the number of robots sold were unsurprisingly lower than in Q1 of 2020, due to impact of the coronavirus pandemic, the number of robots sold in the UK in the first two quarters of 2020 is on par with the number sold for the first three quarters of 2019.

Encouragingly, the Food and Beverage sector experienced 100% growth in first half of 2020 compared to the same period in 2019.  This, perhaps, demonstrates the efforts of the sector to meet increasing demand, while at the same time deal with labour shortages caused by Brexit, and the safety constraints caused by the onset of COVID-19.