Twenty-eight Scottish food and drink businesses are receiving almost £6m of capital support for production investment spanning automation, optical grading, cold storage, processing, traceability, packing, milling, freezing, and new manufacturing capacity.
The awards come through the Scottish Government‘s Food and Drink Processing Scheme Scotland and range from small equipment purchases to £400,000 projects. The distribution of funding across processors, farms, distilleries, dairies, bakeries, and other producers gives a practical picture of where businesses currently see the biggest constraints on output and efficiency.
Simon Howie Butchers in Perth and Kinross has been awarded £295,455.60 for automated slicing, tray filling, and labelling equipment. The project concentrates investment on linked end-of-line operations where manual handling can restrict throughput and create variation between production runs.
Several awards move automation further upstream. Sootywells Farms in Aberdeenshire will receive £376,000 for an AI-enabled optical grading system, John Bryden Potatoes has secured £169,900 for an advanced optical potato grader, and Messrs C Smeaton & Sons will receive £315,660 for robotic palletisation and optical potato sorting.
Processing and preservation account for another large share of the programme. Highland Game in Dundee is receiving £150,947.99 for a carbon-dioxide blast freezer, What’s Fresh in South Lanarkshire has been awarded £88,918.03 to expand milk-processing capacity, and Stirling Potatoes receives £400,000 for equipment supporting flavoured mash production and extended shelf-life processing.
Rowan Glen in Dumfries and Galloway has also secured £400,000 for cottage-cheese and bulk-cream production, while Mackintosh of Glendaveny in Aberdeenshire receives the same amount for a rapeseed-oil refinery, laboratory, and circular processing hub. These are not cosmetic factory upgrades: they add or alter core process capability and can change the products a site is able to make.
Raw-material preparation features repeatedly across the awards. The Benzies Partnership receives £397,732.40 for an advanced vegetable washing and processing line, A & J McDowall has been awarded £171,428.60 for a second flour-milling line, and Wolds Produce receives £400,000 to establish a potato-processing operation using optical grading and packing technology.
Storage and handling projects are similarly prominent. Alexander Bayne & Son is receiving £370,536.80 for optical sorting and additional potato cold storage, while Dornoch Distillery Company has secured £366,045.92 for a whisky maturation warehouse and cask-handling infrastructure. Organic Potato Growers will receive £250,604.87 for automated sizing and sorting equipment intended to increase capacity.
The pattern is typical of food manufacturing, where productivity is determined by the flow of product through a series of dependent operations rather than the speed of one machine. Raising throughput at processing can simply expose a bottleneck at inspection, packing, refrigeration, palletising, or storage if the rest of the line is left unchanged.
Capital spending also has to work within tight operating constraints. Food plants combine hygiene requirements, short product lives, variable raw materials, retailer specifications, energy-intensive heating and cooling, and labour demands that can change sharply between products or seasons. Automation can improve repeatability and reduce manual handling, but poor integration can leave expensive machinery waiting for upstream product or downstream packing capacity.
Digital systems are becoming part of the same investment calculation. Duncan Farms in Aberdeenshire has secured £231,831.20 for digital traceability, automation, and reusable logistics systems, linking physical production equipment with information needed to track materials and assets through the supply chain.
Some grants are much smaller but still remove specific production constraints. Loch Ness Honey Company will receive £8,329.60 for automated extraction, filtering, and jarring, while Yester Estate has secured £19,897.20 for an on-site game-processing facility. The scheme therefore reaches businesses whose capital requirements are measured in thousands of pounds as well as plants planning six-figure machinery programmes.
Scotland’s food and drink sector has an annual turnover of around £19bn, giving these individual projects a wider industrial context. The funding is directed at tangible machinery, facilities, and processing capability, so a significant proportion will flow onward into equipment suppliers, refrigeration specialists, systems integrators, fabricators, installers, and maintenance providers.
The equipment purchases are only the first stage. Productivity gains depend on commissioning, operator training, maintenance, line balancing, product quality, and whether new capacity attracts enough demand to keep it occupied. The breadth of the 28 projects shows that Scottish producers are prepared to invest across those constraints; the next evidence will come from how much additional output and efficiency the machinery actually delivers. That execution phase will determine whether the grants deliver enduring manufacturing capacity rather than one-off equipment purchases.
