From Car Plants to Candy Bars: Where Robots Work Now

North American robot orders jumped double digits in Q3 2025, with food, consumer goods, and other non-automotive sectors leading an automation wave aimed at workforce gaps, reshoring, and new customer demands.
Nov. 27, 2025

If you want a snapshot of where digital transformation is getting real, look at who's buying robots in Q3. It's just about everyone. North American manufacturers are now treating robots less like experiments and more like a standard part of the toolkit.

In Q3 2025, manufacturers ordered 8,806 robots worth $574 million, reflecting a 11.6% increase in units and 17.2% in revenue YOY. With non-automotive sectors accounting for 59% of all orders, we're seeing wider adoption in industries like food and consumer goods, which surged 105%. 

Whether you're in manufacturing, logistics, healthcare, or financial services, automation is shifting from a cost-cutting project to an essential building block of your strategic infrastructure. Food and consumer goods companies are just one of many industries using robots to manage labor shortages and reshoring costs, an investment that will have a strong ROI for any company struggling with talent gaps, supply chain whiplash, or an inefficient back-office workflow.

In case your company didn't get the memo, your competitors are likely using automation to improve productivity and resilience — don't get left behind. 

Read more at Control Design.

About the Author

Abby White

Abby White

Vice President of Content Studio

Abby White is a content strategist, newsroom-trained writer, and brand storyteller. As Vice President of EndeavorB2B’s Content Studio, she leads client-driven custom content programs across 90+ brands and the content strategy for topic and role-based newsletters serving executive audiences. An award-winning journalist with a marketer’s mindset, Abby brings 25 years of experience leading editorial, communications, marketing, and audience-building efforts across industries.

Abby launched her first magazine, Abby’s Top 40, in 1988 and made everyone in her family read it. While attending the University of Illinois, she paid her rent as a professional notetaker, which might explain why she still gets asked to take notes in meetings. Since then, she has held editorial leadership roles at an alt weekly, a newspaper, a luxury lifestyle magazine, a business journal, a music magazine, and regional women’s magazines, developing a sharp writing edge and a conversational tone that resonates with professional audiences. 

She expanded into marketing while leading communications for an entertainment industry nonprofit and later drove rebranding and audience-building efforts for an NPR music station. At EndeavorB2B, she has been instrumental in driving editorial excellence, developing scalable content strategies across multiple verticals, and building the foundation for EDGE, the company’s portfolio of executive newsletters. 

And if you’re a writer interested in contributing to TechEDGE, she’s the person you need to (politely) bug.

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