Coca-Cola Europacific Partners Deploys Boston Dynamics’ Spot Robot at East Kilbride and Wakefield Plants

Imagine a four-legged robot padding quietly through a busy drinks factory, scanning machinery for faults that a human inspector might miss — or simply can’t check often enough. That’s now the reality at Coca-Cola Europacific Partners’ manufacturing sites in East Kilbride, Scotland, and Wakefield, Yorkshire, where Boston Dynamics’ Spot robot has begun carrying out autonomous inspection rounds.

The deployment marks the first time Spot has been used across CCEP’s Great Britain operations, and it follows a broader international rollout that began with a pilot at the company’s Barcelona plant before expanding to nine sites across Spain, France, Germany, Australia, Indonesia and the Netherlands.

What Spot Actually Does on the Factory Floor

Spot isn’t fetching anything or performing tricks. The robot follows pre-programmed routes through the production areas, collecting data from close to 600 inspection points across seven production lines at the two British sites. It does this without stopping the lines or getting in the way of workers.

The sensors it carries are doing the serious work. Spot gathers vibration readings, ultrasound data, thermography images and visual condition information — the kind of multi-layered picture of equipment health that would take a human inspector considerably longer to build up. It can run for around 90 minutes before heading back to recharge and upload what it’s collected.

At East Kilbride — a site that’s been making Coca-Cola products since 1964 — one of the early practical results has been the identification of compressed-air leaks. Engineers can then investigate and carry out repairs. Compressed-air leaks are a common source of wasted energy in manufacturing environments, so catching them earlier has obvious appeal for both cost and sustainability reasons, though CCEP has not published independently verified figures on energy savings made so far.

The Case for Robotic Inspection

The argument CCEP is making is straightforward: Spot can perform inspection rounds far more frequently than conventional manual checks, giving maintenance teams a more up-to-date picture of how equipment is behaving. Spot on the factory floor, so to speak, means faults can be flagged earlier and maintenance work prioritised before something breaks down unexpectedly.

Unplanned downtime is expensive in any manufacturing setting. A drinks production line that stops unexpectedly doesn’t just cost money in lost output — it creates knock-on problems across the supply chain. Predictive maintenance, the broader discipline that Spot sits within, aims to shift factories away from reactive repairs and towards scheduled, planned interventions.

The technology isn’t unique to CCEP. Spot has been deployed in oil and gas facilities, power stations and other industrial settings around the world. But the scale of CCEP’s rollout — now covering sites across multiple continents after starting with a single Barcelona pilot — gives a sense of how seriously the company is taking the approach.

What the Company Says

CCEP has been clear that the intention is to help engineers identify issues earlier, prioritise maintenance work and improve equipment reliability overall. The company describes the East Kilbride and Wakefield deployments as the first step in its Great Britain operations.

Questions Around Workforce and Verification

It’s worth being honest about what we don’t yet know. The effect on staffing levels hasn’t been stated by CCEP. Automation of routine inspection rounds could free engineers to focus on diagnosis and repair — or it could, over time, reduce the number of people needed for those rounds. The company hasn’t addressed that directly.

And while the technology sounds impressive, the claims about improved reliability, reduced downtime and energy savings haven’t been independently verified. CCEP is the source of the figures and descriptions provided so far. That’s not unusual at this stage of a deployment, but it’s a gap worth acknowledging.

The exact number of Spot robots operating across the two sites, and what CCEP paid for them, hasn’t been disclosed.

What This Means for Kent Residents

CCEP does have operations in Kent — its Sidcup site is listed among the company’s Great Britain locations — but there is no confirmed evidence that Spot is currently operating there. The East Kilbride and Wakefield deployments are described as the first across CCEP’s Great Britain operations, so any future rollout to Sidcup remains unverified. For Kent residents as consumers, the broader trend towards predictive maintenance in food and drink manufacturing is aimed at keeping production lines running reliably, which in theory supports consistent product availability on supermarket shelves — though the direct link to what ends up in your local Tesco or Sainsbury’s in Maidstone or Canterbury is indirect at best.