Tag: meat processing

OM in the News: Meet The Robot Butcher

Meatpacking jobs can be some of the toughest, bloodiest and most dangerous around, and companies such as Smithfield, Tyson Foods, and Cargill have long struggled to fully staff slaughterhouses and processing plants. Workers might have to stand for hours a day, often in cold temperatures, repeatedly slicing livestock carcasses on fast-moving processing lines or moving heavy boxes of frozen meat. The companies have sought for years to recruit enough workers and to run their plants at full strength.

A system at Cargill’s beef-processing plant scans meat for bones and other undesirable materials as it passes through the production line

So meatpackers are increasingly looking to robots for help, writes The Wall Street Journal (April 10, 2024). Smithfield, the largest U.S. pork processor, began rolling out automated rib pullers at its pork plants several years ago, which company officials said helps leave less wasted meat on the bone and relieves workers from some of the industry’s most physically demanding jobs—allowing workers to be reassigned from pulling loins or ribs to food-quality inspection jobs.

Taking hourly workers off the processing line and training them to work with robots that require more technical skills can be challenging for meat companies and employees. Tyson is working with a local community colleges to create a pipeline of potential workers.

Tyson has installed more computers and X-ray inspection technology throughout its facilities to detect bones and other undesirable materials in products. Cargill now operates automated rib-chine saws that cleave off the spine from the carcass, and machine hock-cutters that chop the front off shanks, the part of the leg between the knee and the beef carcass. (Automation has been an industry ambition for some time, especially among processors of chickens—which tend to be smaller, more uniform in size and easier for a machine to handle).

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. Why is staffing so difficult at meat packers?
  2. Identify other potential applications of technology in this industry.

OM in the News: Why We Ran Out of Meat

Workers donned protective gear at a Tyson poultry-processing plant in Camilla, Ga.

The Covid-19 pandemic has been a debacle for the $213 billion U.S. meat industry, writes The Wall Street Journal (July 10, 2020). For the first time in memory, there wasn’t enough meat to go around. Reduced production forced grocery giants such as Kroger, Costco. and Albertsons to limit how much fresh meat shoppers could buy. Wendy’s had to tell customers that some restaurants couldn’t serve hamburgers.

Deboning livestock and slicing up chickens has long been hands-on labor. Low-paid workers using knives and saws work on carcasses moving steadily down production lines. It is labor-intensive and dangerous work. and remains one of the more hazardous jobs in the U.S. With 4.3 workplace injuries or illnesses per 100 workers in 2018, the industry’s rate is nearly 40% higher than the national average for all industries, surpassing logging, mining and construction.

And factory floors have been especially conducive to spreading coronavirus. In April and May, more than 17,300 meat and poultry processing workers in 29 states were infected and 91 died. Plant shutdowns reduced U.S. beef and pork production by more than 1/3 in April. The companies are searching for a solution–and they think the found one: robotic butchers.

Over the past 3 years, Tyson, the biggest U.S. company (with 122,000 employees out of 585,000 industry-wide) has invested about $500 million in technology and automation. It plans to increase the shift to robots in the aftermath of the pandemic. While some of these robots, such as automated “back saw” cutters that split hog carcasses along the spinal column, labor alongside humans in plants, the finer cutting, such as trimming fat, for now largely remains in the hands of human workers, many of them immigrants. Annual turnover in meat plants ranges from 40% to 70%, versus 31% average for manufacturers.

Yet a growing consumer appetite for products such as deboned chicken and skinless meat has required more people on processing lines. Decades ago, most Americans bought whole chickens. Now, 85% of chicken eaten is parts like breasts and wings or products such as chicken finger.

Classroom discussion questions:
1. Which of the 9 production technology tools described in Ch. 7 in your Heizer/Render/Munson text could be applied to this industry?

2. Why have robots not made a greater headway in meat plants?

 

OM in the News: The Food Chain’s Weakest Link

This S. Dakota Smithfield Foods slaughterhouse was the nation’s single largest coronavirus “hot spot,” with 16% of the 3,700 employees testing positive.

The modern American slaughterhouse is a very different place from the one that Upton Sinclair depicted in his 1906 novel, “The Jungle.” Many are giant, sleek refrigerated assembly lines, staffed mostly by unionized workers who slice, debone and gut carcasses, under constant oversight of government inspectors. The jobs are often grueling and dangerous, but meat producers have some of the most heavily sanitized work spaces of any industry.

Yet meat plants, honed over decades for maximum efficiency, have become major “hot spots” for the coronavirus pandemic, with some reporting widespread illnesses among their workers, writes The New York Times (April 19, 2020). The health crisis has revealed how these plants are becoming the weakest link in the nation’s food supply chain, posing a serious challenge to meat production. In the cattle industry, a little more than 50 plants are responsible for 98% of U.S. slaughtering.

Shutting down one plant, even for a few weeks, is like closing an airport hub. It backs up hog and beef production across the country, crushes prices paid to farmers and eventually leads to months of meat shortages. “Slaughterhouses are a critical bottleneck in the system,” said one SCM professor.

The ripple effects of the virus are now being felt across the entire meat supply chain, all the way to grocery stores. More than a dozen beef, pork and chicken processing plants have closed or are running at greatly reduced speeds. The number of cattle slaughtered has dropped 22% from a year ago. Plant closings have also caused a major disruption, leaving many ranchers with nowhere to send their animals.

Large numbers of employees have become infected in other businesses where people work close together. But the pandemic has caused more serious disruption in the meat industry, where consolidation has given outsize importance to a small number of plants.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. Chapter 11 of your Heizer/Render/Munson text examines ethics within the supply chain. Relate the slaughterhouse supply chain to this issue.
  2. Detail the meat supply chain.

OM in the News: The European Meat Industry’s Supply Chain Dilemma

Europe is internationally known for its commitment to the environment and fighting climate change. “But there is still a business that continues to embody the recklessness of a bygone era of pollution and destruction: the European meat industry,” reports Mighty Earth (March, 2018). The meat industry relies on massive quantities of soy for animal feed to raise livestock: about 3/4 of the world’s soy is used for animal feed. An area 3 times the size of Germany is dedicated to growing soy in South America, with over 30 million tons of soybeans making it to Europe annually. Deforestation is the result of a supply chain that starts on the South American frontier and ends on European plates.

Large agribusiness companies like Cargill and Bunge are bulldozing and burning thousands of hectares of an ecosystem region spanning Argentina, Bolivia, and Paraguay to make way for industrial soy.  Waterways have become polluted, and local communities report a surge in birth defects, cancers, and respiratory illnesses in not only children, but pets and livestock as well.

The total emissions associated with the conversion of South American forest and grasslands to croplands is over 3 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide between 1985 and 2013, more than 4 times Germany’s annual carbon dioxide emissions from fuel combustion. And this trend has been accelerating. Argentina alone lost 22% of its forests between 1990 and 2015, mostly to establish soy farms.

One of the reasons why the agribusiness companies’ policies and actions are so important is that they are operating in a frequently lawless environment. In Argentina, licenses issued by the local government have illegally authorized the deforestation of 150,000 hectares of protected forest, leaving soy businesses to clear land with impunity. But they would not have an incentive to do so if European companies were unwilling to buy deforestation-based soy in the first place. Despite Cargill and Bunge publicly declaring their commitment to eliminating deforestation from their operations, it has continued to occur in their supply chains.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. Should soy-farming sustainability be an OM concern?
  2. What can be done to minimize the impact on South American ecology?

 

OM in the News: Kraft Foods Fixes Its Factories

Workers check the sliced ham as it is packaged at the new plant in Iowa.

“For decades, Kraft Foods produced Oscar Mayer cold cuts out of a 6-story, former slaughterhouse built in 1872,” reports The Wall Street Journal (Feb. 13, 2018). The systems seemed out of another era. Workers drove forklifts loaded with giant vats of ham, turkey and chicken parts on and off freight elevators to different processing points. A typical turkey breast required 4 rides between floors to get from raw meat to packaged slices. Breakdowns could slow production to a crawl. The inefficiency was easy to spot for 3G Capital, which took over Kraft in 2015.

3G started by moving production to a new, $225 million plant, where the first cold cuts rolled off the assembly line in June. Gone are the elevators. Instead, conveyor belts whisk “stick meat”—macerated proteins stuffed into 6-foot-long casings—through processing rooms. New machines can handle 15,000-pound batches. Robotic arms pick up trays and place them in room-size ovens. Automated slicers deliver perfect 9-ounce portions that drop into plastic containers.

Changing the open-floor plan of the old plant to one with separated work rooms means less downtime from sanitizing the lines. In the slicing room, cooked stick meat enters one end of a carving machine and emerges in identical sets of cold cuts that drop into containers, which have been folded into shape seconds before from plastic sheets. Sensors in the conveyor belt weigh each portion, automatically pushing away extra slices.

When it hits full capacity in a few weeks, the plant will be able to churn out 2.8 million pounds of sliced meat a week, about 17% more than the old factory, while employing 500 fewer people. “We look at pretty much any opportunity we have to drive efficiency,” says Kraft’s supply chain head.

In the broader overhaul of nationwide production, 3G used computer modeling to analyze where it sourced ingredients, where it needed to ship finished products, and the cost and availability of labor and other resources.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. How did the reorganization and move improve productivity?
  2. What OM techniques were used to guide the changes?