The government and UK suppliers have pledged to guarantee hundreds of jobs for UK nationals in a bid to reduce the food and drink industry’s reliance on migrant workers, The Grocer can reveal.

The multimillion-pound strategy includes plans for a new UK centre of excellence of food production engineering, a gold standard for trainees and a commitment by leading companies to provide at least 600 jobs for unemployed young people.

One hundred thousand food and drink manufacturing workers – more than a quarter of the workforce – are foreign nationals, which critics claim is unsustainable and inefficient.

The new strategy has been designed to make the industry more attractive to young people from the UK. Just one in 15 say they would consider a career in food and drink, despite a million people under 21 being unemployed.

The government will spend £1.7m on the series of new initiatives, which will be matched by some of the top companies in the business, including Premier Foods, Britvic, Brakes and Dale Farm.

“There has been a rise of migrant workers in the sector and what we’re trying to do is to create a level playing field for UK nationals,” said Jack Matthews, chief executive of Improve, the skills council for the UK food and drink sector which negotiated the bid for funding.

“Companies have found it very hard to get access to properly-trained UK nationals – whereas access from abroad, particularly the EU, has been much easier. Everybody talked a few years ago about migrants having gone back, but in this sector that’s not the case. We’re not trying to make it harder for migrants, we’re trying to make it equal.”

In some sectors, the proportion of foreign workers is even bigger – migrants make up 36% of the meat workforce, for instance. Improve said in some factories up to 27 different languages were spoken, leading to major costs for employers in training staff in English.