IN Brief:
- OAL has secured £5m from Innovate UK to accelerate robotic systems for food manufacturing.
- The company is targeting more than 1,000 installations by 2030, with a focus on fenceless robotics for constrained production sites.
- The investment comes as food manufacturers face labour shortages, safety pressure, and demand for higher-throughput handling.
OAL has secured a £5m Innovate UK Innovation Loan to accelerate the deployment of robotic systems across food manufacturing, with a target of installing more than 1,000 systems by 2030.
The five-year programme will focus on robotic automation for tasks including pick-and-place handling and palletising. OAL is targeting existing food production sites where space is limited and conventional industrial robotics can be difficult to integrate because of guarding requirements, footprint, and process disruption.
The company’s fenceless robotic systems are designed to operate safely alongside people without traditional safety cages. That format is intended to make automation more accessible to food manufacturers that need to improve throughput but cannot easily reconfigure production halls or dedicate large areas to fixed robotic cells.
Food manufacturing remains one of the UK’s largest industrial employers, with more than 430,000 people working in the sector. OAL has pointed to more than 100,000 hard-to-fill roles, with repetitive handling, packing, and palletising operations among the areas most exposed to labour shortages.
Jake Norman, innovation manager at OAL, said: “This Innovate UK support is a clear vote of confidence in the future of British food manufacturing. We’re now in a position to supercharge the deployment of fenceless robotics and help build more resilient, efficient and future-ready factories across the UK and beyond.”
The loan is also expected to support more than 100 new roles and apprenticeship opportunities within OAL’s own operations. Food-sector automation depends on engineering support, integration capability, maintenance skills, and operator confidence, particularly where robotic systems are being added to live production environments rather than purpose-built greenfield facilities.
Many food manufacturers are trying to improve the flow of finished goods from production into storage, dispatch, and distribution while working inside older plants. Systems that can be retrofitted into existing lines are therefore more likely to gain traction than equipment requiring major building redesign.
Large-scale logistics investment in the sector is also increasing, with M&S beginning work on a £340m automated food logistics centre. OAL’s programme addresses another part of the same operating chain: the production-side handling tasks that determine how efficiently goods move into storage and onward distribution.
Automation in food environments has to account for product variation, hygiene controls, washdown requirements, packaging changes, and continuous production schedules. These constraints have often slowed robotics adoption compared with automotive or electronics manufacturing, where product geometry and process layouts are more predictable. Smaller, safer, and more adaptable robotic systems are changing the investment case for manufacturers that have historically viewed robotics as too disruptive for live food plants.
For palletising and pick-and-place work, the strongest business case often sits across labour availability, injury reduction, and line reliability. Repetitive lifting and handling can create staffing and safety problems, particularly where production schedules require extended shifts or seasonal peaks. Automating those tasks allows teams to move into supervision, quality, discrepancy resolution, maintenance support, and process improvement.
OAL already has systems deployed in the UK and Europe, including with food and ingredient businesses such as Domino’s Pizza, Solina, and Agrana. The Innovate UK loan gives the company a route to scale those deployments more aggressively while keeping the focus on practical retrofit projects.
The 2030 target is ambitious, but the direction of the food manufacturing supply chain is clear. As retailers demand faster and more consistent replenishment, production sites need to remove avoidable handling delays before goods reach the warehouse. Robotics is moving closer to the centre of that process, with automation increasingly used to clear the manual bottlenecks between factory output and logistics performance.
