Calling Food and Drink manufacturers: Digital Manufacturing and the impact on Net Zero

As part of the Made Smarter Programme, KTN has been awarded £1.5M to establish an Innovation Network and Web Portal, which will run to early 2025. Each sector will share relevant “Insights” and cross-sector learnings that will support industry and achieve the required metrics. The Innovation Network will accelerate knowledge of and adoption of digital manufacturing.

The agriculture, food and drink industry is the UK’s largest manufacturing industry and plays a vital role in the UK’s food supply chain, which contributed £121 billion to the UK economy in 2018 – supporting around 4 million jobs.

The KTN Agrifood team are keen to hear from food and drink manufacturers who have adopted industrial digital technologies and may have a success story to share or from companies who wish to understand more about the benefits of adopting advanced digital technologies. In particular, we are keen to hear from companies with challenges around Net Zero. This may be discussion around the support required to achieve significant and sustained productivity improvements, minimisation of waste and optimisation of efficiencies across the supply chain.

The KTN Agrifood team will identify strengths and weaknesses as well as the areas for improvement and importantly the opportunity digital manufacturing represents towards achieving net zero targets. Publication of these findings will align with a proposed future Made Smarter funding call.