CBI President visits Northern Ireland's shining food and drink sector

Outgoing CBI President and Cobra Beer boss Lord Karan Bilimoria CBE, DL is visiting Co.Down and Belfast (today), to meet with food and drink businesses to discuss the value of these sectors to Northern Ireland’s economy.

In his last major visit as CBI President, Lord Bilimoria will hear from companies about the opportunities and challenges they face, as well as the critical role they play for food security between GB-NI and the island of Ireland.

The food and drink sector is worth £4.9bn of GVA to the NI economy, with £1.54bn coming directly from food and drink manufacturing and £2.6bn generated from supply chains and wages.  The two industries employ around 113,000 people with 54,000 working directly for the sector and another 59,000 working in their supply chains.

Angela McGowan, CBI Northern Ireland Director, said: 

“NI’s food and drink sector is integral to our economy.  Its scale and contribution to the wider economy, as well as its capacity to innovate is first-rate.

“The industry showed real resilience these past few years, which is why it’s been a pleasure hosting Karan and hearing about the importance of the region’s agri-food and drink sectors, food security, managing rising production costs and moving to a low carbon food production economy. By sharing these experiences and fully understanding the current challenges faced by the industry, he and the CBI team can feedback these conversations with Government and policymakers.

“CBI UK has launched an Economic Resilience campaign and we firmly believe that NI domestic food and drink production has a critical role to play in building that resilience.  I’ll be personally doing all I can to ensure the voice of NI business is heard.”

Sector data quoted can be found at https://nifda.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Food-for-Thought-EIA-of-the-Food-and-Drink-sector-in-NI.pdf