From the field to the table, labour is one of the most expensive components in growing, harvesting, distributing, preparing and serving food.
It’s also one of the hardest components to come by. Here in New Zealand, our famous kiwifruit are rotting on the vines because in the face of international travel restrictions and a reluctance by New Zealanders to work at seasonal jobs, there simply aren’t enough pickers. The pickers from the Pacific Islands who normally fly in to do the work on temporary work visas are unable to enter the country because of Covid restrictions.
How is agribusiness is coping with rising labour costs and turnover?
By implementing automation and artificial intelligence (AI) in their operations, according to the Boston Consulting Group. But so far only leading players in the industry have been able to afford this. BCG warns that to remain competitive, other food producers and processors must also automate or die.
A New Zealand company is working on a solution
More than 3 billion kiwifruit must be harvested each year, according to Robotics Plus, a Christchurch-based firm that has emerged, they say, from the need to solve the growing challenges in global primary industries. They recently developed a kiwifruit-picking robot (pictured below) which could be the future of orchard work and help curb the worker shortage in the industry.
An automated system to grade and pack kiwifruit developed twelve years ago by the School of Engineering and Technology at New Zealand's Massey University, in conjunction with kiwifruit marketing organisation Zespri, is now widely used in the industry.
Read more about Robotics Plus kiwifruit-picking robot here >
How the Covid pandemic has accelerated existing trends
Many of the current investments in automation and AI technologies were already well under way before Covid-19, according to the Brookings Institution, a Washington DC-based not-for-profit with the mission of conducting research that leads to new ideas for solving problems facing society at the local, national and global level. But there’s no doubt that the pandemic has accelerated the trend.
The Institution acknowledges that the automation of the agriculture, food, and related industries may be alarming to some because these industries employ one in ten workers in the United States. But health and safety issues during the pandemic combined with the rising cost of labour will fuel the continued growth of automation and AI in the future, they predict.
Read the full Brookings article here >
The future of automation in foodservice
“We’re not quite there yet, but the ability to supplement or replace human labor with automated solutions is fast becoming a lifeline for many foodservice operators,” says Food Service Equipment and Supplies.
Despite four out of ten consumers saying in an Oracle survey that they’d visit a restaurant less often if it used greeting robots, ordering kiosks are now commonplace in the likes of McDonald’s. At the back-of-house, California-based Zume Pizza uses pizza-making robots — named Pepe, Giorgio, Marta, Bruno and Vincenzo — to handle repetitive, low-skill and potentially risky tasks such as dough pressing, sauce spreading and placing pizzas into the 800-degree ovens.
Read the Food Service Equipment and Supplies article here >
What's stopping the food industry from automating?
Figuring out how and where to apply new technologies and finding money to pay for them are major challenges, says Warren Solochek of market research company NPD Group. But an equally important challenge is deciding when to invest.
“Technology changes so fast that it keeps a lot of people on the sidelines,” he says. “They know that soon after they make the investment it will probably be obsolete. The argument that you can amortize the cost over eight years or so sounds good, but what happens to that investment if the technology changes in two years?”
I'm Robin La Pere, Business and Franchise Consultant.
I felt that this article was necessary because there are so many small-to-medium businesses and franchises in the food industry, and they are bound to be impacted by the rapid changes in that industry. Talk to me about an expert analysis of your business model and ways to futureproof your business.
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