Scottish Food & Drink Industry Aims to Double Size to £30 Billion By 2030
A new, ambitious strategy to drive growth in Scotland’s farming, fishing, food and drink industry has been unveiled by industry body, Scotland Food & Drink. Food and drink has been Scotland’s best performing sector in recent years, with record export figures and sales at home increasing rapidly too.
The sector is worth £14.4 billion annually, 119,000 people are working directly in the industry and food manufacturing in Scotland is growing at twice the rate of the UK average for the sector.
The new strategy, ‘Ambition 2030’, establishes a vision to cement food and drink as Scotland’s most valuable industry, with the opportunity to more than double turnover in the sector to reach £30 billion by 2030.
The strategy has been developed by the Scotland Food & Drink Partnership, an industry-led partnership of the main organisations in the farming, fishing, food and drink sector, alongside The Scottish Government and its key agencies.
The industry’s focus will be on building Scotland’s national brand as a Land of Food and Drink and driving sales within Scotland, across the rest of the UK and globally. To unlock the £30 billion potential of the industry, the strategy focuses on three areas:
- People and Skills: raising attractiveness of the industry as a career destination and investing in the existing workforce.
- Supply Chain: ensuring farmers, fishermen, manufacturers and buyers work in closer partnership, to ensure greater profitability is shared across the industry.
- Innovation: embracing a new culture of developing new products and processes to drive growth.
In addition, the industry has made a renewed commitment to responsible growth, committing to deliver broader benefits to the country beyond just sales growth. This includes an offer of a new partnership with Government and its agencies to drive improvements in Scotland’s health and wellbeing and to commit again to embracing world-leading standards of environmental sustainability.
The 2030 strategy identifies collaboration as the most important ingredient in the sector’s success to date with plans to deepen joint-working between the industry, government and its agencies in the coming years, as well as to make support easier to access for businesses.
James Withers, Scotland Food & Drink Chief Executive, says: “Ten years ago, when the Scotland Food & Drink Partnership was formed, our sector was relatively static. It is now one of the country’s best performing industries and it’s our fastest growing export sector.”
He continues: “As an industry, we have identified an opportunity to more than double the size of our sector to £30 billion by 2030, making it Scotland’s most valuable industry. A huge amount of work is required to unlock that potential and it will not come easily. There is uncertainty ahead, with Brexit in the forefront of everybody’s mind. Whilst big political upheavals are out of the industry’s control, we can control how we develop the Scottish brand, the markets we want to sell to and the investments we make in improving skills, innovation and supply chains.”
