5,600 new jobs for Scottish food and drink industry

More than 100 Scottish food and drink businesses – with an estimated aggregate turnover of £6bn – predicted 19% growth over the next five years.

Respondents forecast that at least new 940 vacancies would be created in their businesses by 2018. If the results are repeated across the whole Scottish food and drink production sector, the bank calculated a total of 5,600 extra jobs will be created.

Two-thirds of businesses planned to increase their workforce in the next five years as the food and drink sector continued to outpace the wider economy. 

James Withers, chief executive of Scotland Food and Drink, claimed the outlook for the industry had never been better.

“The food and drink industry has been Scotland’s best performing domestic sector in the past five years and its fastest growing export sector,”​ said Withers. ​

‘Thousands of new jobs’​

“Ambitious sales and export targets are in place for 2017, but the rapid progress so far means we are having to upscale our ambitions already. Achieving this level of growth will not only represent success for the industry but also for Scotland with the potential to create thousands of new jobs.”​

Withers added that hosting the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games, the Ryder Cup and second Scottish Homecoming next year would provide additional opportunities to promote the food and drink sector.

Alasdair Gardner, md of commercial banking at Bank of Scotland said the creation of more than 5,600 jobs would be a very welcome boost to communities across Scotland as economic recovery continued.

“This is our second annual market survey on Scotland’s Food and Drink sector and following the opportunities we identified in last year’s survey, I’m delighted to see that overall confidence levels remain high and the sector is pushing ahead delivering record growth,”​ said Gardner.

‘Soon be alongside oil and gas’​

“The reality is that if this level of growth continues we will see levels of growth in the food and drink industry that could soon be alongside oil and gas on the export market.”   ​

Trade body Scotland Food & Drink has set targets for the food and drink sector to achieve a value of £12.5bn by 2017, with exports contributing over £7.1bn.

The Scottish Food and Drink Federation (SFDF) said the report underlined the need to attract the right calibre of new workers into the industry.

“To realise our ambition to deliver increased rates of significant, shared and sustainable growth in Scottish food and drink manufacturing, we know that we'll need to recruit more talented individuals and equip them with the right skills,”​ Dr Colette Backwell, SFDF director, told FoodManufacture.co.uk.

The federation was working with manufacturers – through SFDF’s Scottish government-funded ‘A Future in Food’ programme, which facilitates industry and education partnership, to establish food and drink as a career of first choice.

“Our sector urgently needs to secure a pipeline of young engineers to support our shared vision with government of delivering 20% growth by 2020,”​ said Backwell.