Food & Beverage Plant Automation Makes Humans Work Differently
Automation in food & beverage processing certainly is not a new kid on the block. Yet, nearly continuous innovation and ideation around the technology mean companies need to stay up to date on solutions as quickly as they hit the market.
Years ago, the industry wondered how deeply and quickly automation would infiltrate plants — and how many workers would be made obsolete. Today, automation and robotics solutions can be found for most any food- or beverage-processing and packaging application — and human beings haven’t been outright replaced either.
“In facilities that find it hard to retain employees to do certain jobs or get to certain areas, they're moving toward robotics and automation,” explains Geoff Coltman, senior vice president, Catena Solutions. “But human beings are still at the core of everybody's business, and robotics are being added in support of the human beings.”
Ian Fox, vice president value chain operations for Royal Canin North America, explains that as automation has progressed quickly over the years, the company has incorporated solutions in various aspects of the operation.
“Automation plays a key role in the Royal Canin supply chain,” he says. “Many of our processes are automated, so having the right infrastructure to enable that automation is key and elevates our ability for real-time traceability, end to end.”
The company is creating a digital factory, encompassing data and reporting and digital twin capabilities, to keep in step with the ever-advancing innovations in automation. It also currently uses artificial intelligence to help with enhanced maintenance troubleshooting.
“We use technology every day, from digital data and reporting to using artificial intelligence for troubleshooting and associate training,” Fox says. “We are excited to incorporate the latest automation into our end-to-end supply chain including real-time decision-making through digital modeling and simulation.”
In mid-May 2025, Royal Canin cut the ribbon on a new, $450 million pet-food processing facility in Lewisburg, Ohio — a 450,000-sq.-ft. complex that is advanced enough to produce the entire range of Royal Canin dry pet food — each of which requires the ultimate accuracy in batching, processing and inspection.
“Our new factory in Lewisburg contains nano-dosing capabilities that enable us to deliver precise dosing at exceedingly small quantities,” explains Fox. “Multiple levels of scale verification have been built into our site that elevates levels of traceability and ensures precise nutrition for cats and dogs.”
Driven by humans
If Royal Canin’s Lewisburg facility is pushing the envelope on state-of-the-art technology and automation, it’s worth noting that the plant still is expected to create 270 new jobs in the next five years, highlighting the fact that there remains a place for people in food & beverage processing plants. The facility already has gotten off to a great start, Fox says, building a workplace culture that has kept the early operations running well.
“We believe safety performance starts with culture and consider it to be our highest priority,” he says. “We are proud to share that our team at the Lewisburg facility successfully worked over a million hours without a lost time incident throughout construction and startup of the factory.”
The remaining human element and its impact fits with what Coltman sees in the wider industry, where robotics are not replacing humans, maybe just dispatching them to different areas of need.
“It's facility enablement with humans at the center of it,” he says. “Pre-programmed robots are moving products from place to place, picking and packing products too, but in many of those areas, they haven't eliminated the employees — they've upskilled a lot of them.”
And that’s the level of progress the industry has reached. Companies have long known that automation might be a great solution to take some of the menial, dangerous or injurious tasks out of the hands of humans, and that those employees could be moved to more rewarding or better jobs. Now, Coltman says it’s actually happening.
“There had been a lot of worry of robotics replacing human beings, but there haven’t been mass layoffs of workers in manufacturing plants because AI or robotics were installed,” he explains. “If anything, there's more hiring now of humans than there ever had been at those facilities.”
Processors today are looking for automation solutions that can help the employees impact the bottom line. Workers loading or unloading heavy boxes of product, raw material or ingredients might use exoskeleton devices that assist and protect the wearer. Or maybe the companies are installing a solution to help them reduce downtime on lines, through automated equipment that can access areas maintenance workers cannot and inspect or sense wear and tear on machinery or parts, such as belts, heat, temperature, etc., for preventative maintenance.
That’s an area in which the industry can still improve, Coltman says, as “the majority of the industry still runs to failure on a lot of things.” Skilled labor can help the cause by taking the next step of upskilling with their employer’s help.
“Machinery can’t fix itself, so skilled labor needs to upskill to understand and be able to read the data being fed and build a maintenance plan around that,” he says. “And it's going to take even further investment from manufacturing companies for learning and development, because these types of workers aren't just coming out of the woodwork or walking out of the cornfields into their facilities.”
Still, the next frontier of automation may help here, too. How workers handle all the data pouring in from their interconnected lines and facilities to develop a predictive maintenance program, rather than a planned maintenance program, could get an assist from technology.
“Everybody thinks of automation as hard-wired assets, but automation can be formulas, predictive data analytics, cognitive learning,” Coltman says. Automation of all types can help the core human workers in the plant learn how to work differently and keep the robots and automated systems humming along, without eliminating the need for living, breathing workers in the plants.
Coltman doesn’t see automation or robotics taking over a facility and causing any company to remove or significantly reduce a plant’s workforce. He simply sees humans making one of many historic adjustments to technological advancements, something we’ve done as a species many times before.
“We don't need farriers to fix horseshoes much anymore because we don't ride horses; we need car mechanics,” he says. “In food processing, the robots aren’t replacing humans, they’re just making humans learn how to work as humans in a different way, like we all have done before.”
