The Food and Drink industry maintains a keen focus on safety, both in manufacturing processes and in the safety of the final product itself. However, manufacturing remains a high-risk industry, which accounted for 22% of workplace fatalities in the UK in 2023/24. Equally, the Food and Drink industry is not immune to the various factors which make ensuring the safety of manufacturing workers a continuing challenge. In this blog we consider two of those challenges and discuss how the industry might tackle them.
Recruitment and Staff Turnover
Like so many sectors, the Food and Drink industry is facing a period where recruitment is difficult and staff turnover is high. These days it is rare indeed for an employee to reach 30 years' service. In addition to the financial and efficiency implications of this, regular staff turnover and a relatively inexperienced workforce create a significant risk of workplace accidents. Gone are the hugely experienced site supervisors who knew the policies and procedures inside out (and probably wrote them), and who could be relied upon to train new staff and monitor compliance on the factory floor. In their place is a less experienced, and often transient, workforce who lack that ingrained understanding of how things are done, and why they have to be done that way.
This creates an environment where institutional knowledge can be lost, policies and procedures become less well understood and there can be a creep towards a "better" way of working. That gradual, unnoticed deviation from the safe system of work is one of the most common causes of workplace accidents in the manufacturing industry.
Three simple steps can help mitigate that risk: (i) before long-standing employees leave, make the time to gather and record their knowledge and experience – have a proper system for preserving your institutional knowledge, (ii) maintain a strong focus on high-quality inductions, initial training and ongoing refreshers and development for all employees – make sure that training is adapted to reflect the knowledge you capture from your most experienced employees, and (iii) monitor compliance with policies and procedures on a daily basis – if there is a creep away from established processes, senior managers need to identify and address that before it results in an incident or accident.
Automation and Technology
Technological advancements undoubtedly provide an opportunity to remove manual or hazardous processes from the workplace and deliver improvements in process safety. However, it is important to remember that change, even positive change involving new technology, alters the risk profile of your business and those new risks must be assessed and appropriate mitigations put in place.
Automation is a perfect example of this. Very few, if any, sites will be fully automated meaning that staff will be working with and around autonomous machinery. Automated bottling lines, or automated vehicles moving ingredients and product around the factory and warehouse all create new risks. How are automated vehicles going to move safely in areas where people are walking? If they are electric (and therefore quiet) how are they going to be heard above the inevitable noise of the factory? How are you going to ensure that machinery which is working autonomously can be stopped quickly in the event of an incident?
The answer, as with almost every other aspect of workplace safety, is to carry out a risk assessment. Don’t just focus on the risks that new technology removes - it is essential that a comprehensive assessment of new risks created is carried out, and that the appropriate control measures are put in place to mitigate those risks.
Contributor
Partner
