Tag: slaughterhouse

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: How Many Hogs Can Be Safely Slaughtered Per Hour?

 

Headlines this past week have touted the benefits to global sustainability of eating more vegetables and less meat. But the demand for pork seems to keep increasing. “The federal government is poised this month to adopt a rule that would essentially turn the largest pork processing lines in the U.S.into the autobahn: no speed limit”‘ writes The New York Times (Aug. 9, 2019).

Currently, plants are allowed to slaughter a maximum of 1,106 hogs per hour. As hogs move down the slaughter lines, U.S. inspectors stationed at each plant examine them and remove any part potentially harmful to consumers. But pork producers have pushed for a change to inspection regulations that would do away with the speed limit and reduce the number of federal inspectors. For those in favor of the change, the advantages are clear. Plants would be able to slaughter more pigs and, therefore, make more money. The government would save money because it would not employ as many inspectors.

The U.S. currently assigns 7 inspectors at various points along the slaughter lines at pork plants, who look at, examine and sniff carcasses for signs of disease and contamination. In the new model, 2-3 federal inspectors per shift would be on the lines, overseeing plant employees who would take over time-consuming labor like removing lymph nodes to test for disease. Two others would perform other tasks like sanitation checks.

As for whether faster lines are more dangerous for workers, the Food Safety and Inspection Service said that was not in its jurisdiction. Line speeds, it said, were historically determined by the ability of federal inspectors to examine and evaluate the meat. The issue of worker safety, it said, falls to the OSHA.  There is no national database where all packing houses report injuries and accidents. (There have been five amputations or other severe injuries at a pork processing facility in Beardstown, Ill. since 2015).C

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. What are the operations issues involved in this case?
  2. Discuss the worker safety tradeoffs.

OM in the News: The Bone Factory

meat factoryBlood is everywhere in JBS’s vast slaughterhouse in Greeley, Colo., reports BusinessWeek (Sept. 23-29, 2013). It’s puddled on concrete floors, smeared on workers’ smocks, gushing from cattle knifed on the killing floor. The smell hangs on the air in a high-ceilinged room, where JBS employees toil at chopping tables along a conveyor belt. With hooks in one hand and knives in the other, they trim fat and pare as much muscle from the bone and vertebrae as they can, turning raw slabs into tenderloins and New York strips.

“Disassembly” lines like this one, relying not on robots but humans, are where JBS and other meatpackers make money. Profit margins are slim in the meat business. Rivals buy essentially the same livestock, fatten them on the same feed, and hope to whittle extra scraps of profit by being the most efficient at turning carcasses into salable cuts. “Humans have not invented a machine that can debone a cow or a chicken as efficiently as a human being,” says a JPMorgan analyst.

Each day, the Greeley plant’s 3,200 workers can slaughter and debone 5,400 head of cattle, producing 3.3 million pounds of meat. Beef expertly cut from the bone can fetch $10 a pound at retail, while leftover scraps get 1/10 of that, quickly adding up to a lot of lost profit.

JBS spends heavily on training and equipment to improve the yield. A steer or heifer can yield 72% of its gutted weight. Further, the company also installed overhead screens that flash numbers indicating whether workers are meeting yield targets. Progress is also measured in bones: the clean, white skeletal fragments are tossed into baskets behind the disassembly line, where supervisors count how many each line worker is detaching. Top producers wear black hats and get paid more.

Classroom discussion questions:

1. How does the disassembly line differ from an assembly line?

2. Why is productivity so important at JBS?