Overcoming Skills Shortages: Integrating Robotics and Quality Control Tech on the Factory Floor

The money is already moving

Automation has stopped being a conversation about the future of the sector and become a line in next year's budget. The Food and Drink Federation's State of Industry report for Q2 2026 found 31% of manufacturers expecting to increase investment in plant and machinery, the only category where more businesses planned to spend more than planned to spend less. Over a quarter (28%) named automation to address labour shortages as a growth priority, and a third expect to put more into automation as a response to cost pressure.

The driver is labour cost as much as labour availability. Since 2016 the minimum wage has risen by a cumulative 76.5%, against 50.5% for average UK earnings. When the cost of a manual handling task climbs faster than everything else on the P&L, the payback on a pick-and-place cell starts to look different.

We're starting from behind, though

The Manufacturing Technology Centre's Global Robotics Clusters Study describes the UK as the only G7 country below the global average for robot density, with adoption among smaller manufacturers lagging furthest. Its reporting puts 74% of UK manufacturing SMEs as having no robot installed at all.

For a lot of food and drink sites, this means the first serious automation project is happening now, with no in-house history of running one. The equipment arrives ahead of the capability to look after it.

What actually changes on the floor

The headcount conversation is usually the wrong one. Automation rarely empties a factory. It changes what the people in it are doing, and that shift is bigger than most capex papers allow for.

A manual line degrades gracefully. Someone is slower, someone covers, the shift gets through it. An automated line doesn't do that. It runs at rate or it stops, and when it stops the job becomes diagnosis under time pressure. The operator who was excellent at speed and stamina on a packing line isn't automatically the person you want reading a fault code at two in the morning.

So the skill you need on shift moves from doing the task to understanding why the machine has stopped doing it. That's a different kind of hire, and it's a different kind of training plan.

Quality control tech creates a job of its own

Vision systems, X-ray, checkweighers, metal detection and inline measurement all do the same thing from a technical point of view. They generate evidence continuously, and somebody has to own it.

That means validating the system when it goes in, setting and justifying the reject criteria, keeping the challenge testing current, and being able to explain the whole lot to a retailer auditor who wants to know what happens to a pack the camera flags at three in the morning. It's a Technical role, it didn't exist in this form fifteen years ago, and plenty of sites are absorbing it into a Technical Manager's week without anybody formally deciding to.

The engineer you need is in short supply

The person that makes all of this work is a multi-skilled engineer who's comfortable with PLCs, SCADA and robot programming, and who also understands caustic washdown, hygienic design, allergen changeover and what BRCGS expects of a maintenance record. The overlap between those two skill sets is small.

And you're bidding for that person against sectors that pay more and ask less. Automotive, pharmaceuticals, logistics and data centre operators all want controls engineers, and none of them need someone to stand in a chilled environment at four in the morning. That's the market you're recruiting into.

The training budget tells the story

Here's the tension in the numbers. The same FDF survey that found 31% planning more investment in plant and machinery found 65% expecting their skills and training spend to stay flat over the next twelve months, with only 13% planning an increase. Sites are buying the technology at a faster rate than they're building the capability to run it.

You can see the result on any site where an expensive system runs in its simplest mode because nobody's confident enough to use the rest of it.

What to do about it

Put the engineering capability in the capex case, next to the equipment. If the business case assumes a certain uptime, name the person who's going to deliver it and budget for them.

Recruit before commissioning, not after. An automation or controls engineer who's on site through installation and the first production runs learns the system properly. One who arrives six months later inherits a black box and a folder of OEM manuals.

Where the permanent hire won't land in time, interim automation and controls specialists can cover commissioning and the early weeks of production. It's a well-established market in food manufacturing, and it buys you the knowledge transfer you'd otherwise lose to the installer's van.

And look at who you already have. The maintenance technician who keeps asking to see the PLC code is usually a better bet than an external hire who's never worked in food. Fund the training and keep them.

We recruit Automation Engineers, Controls Engineers, Engineering Managers and Maintenance Managers into food and drink manufacturing, and it's the only sector we work in. If you've got a project going in next year, the conversation about who runs it is one to have now.

Call the team on 0161 399 1575 or email info@truenorthtalent.co.uk, and we can advise you what that skill set is costing in your region.

Sources

Food and Drink Federation, State of Industry Report Q2 2026 – fdf.org.uk 

Manufacturing Technology Centre, Global Robotics Clusters Study: A Blueprint to Accelerate the UK Adoption of Robotics & Autonomous Systems – the-mtc.org