Protecting Meat Plant Workers Without Disrupting the Supply Chain During COVID-19

To encourage safe practices even when employees are not at work, Cargill, which has had 1,372 COVID-19 cases in its facilities, began providing buses with protective barriers to employees to discourage carpooling. Inside the plant, the company implemented standard prevention measures such as PPE, barriers, and social distancing, as well as a temporary wage increase. “If our employees see a practice that does not adhere to our values or these policies, we encourage them to speak with a manager or call our open ethics line,” says a spokesperson. “We adopted a ‘see something, say something’ safety culture many years ago to ensure our workplaces are safe for all who enter.”

Most plants are back up and running at about 95% of typical production levels, says Keith Belk, head of the department of animal sciences at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, but with less staff on the floor, and with shifts spread out over more days. To keep production numbers up, plants may be opting not to fill custom orders. They also may be shipping more half or whole carcasses and producing fewer tray-ready cuts that go right onto supermarket shelves.

Preventing Future Shutdowns

The coronavirus pandemic represents a shift for the meat processing industry, which will have to be as diligent about protecting human health as it is about food safety. “It took the 1993 E. coli outbreak at Jack in the Box to really figure out what we needed to do to prevent food safety outbreaks,” says Belk. “I think the same will be true here.”

Looking forward, researchers think that new meatpacking plants will be designed to avoid some of the pitfalls of the shutdowns in April and May. This could mean building more, but smaller, plants so that one shutdown doesn’t have as sizable an impact on the supply chain. Future plants could be built with more square footage to enable better social distancing. They may also be designed with optimized personnel flow within the plant. “We did this years ago when we got more serious about eliminating pathogens in raw products, and we knew we couldn’t have people go from raw areas in the plant to other areas,” says Dr. Mills.z

The most foolproof solution, however, would be to invest in more automation at the fabrication level. At Europe’s largest pig slaughterhouse, which relies heavily on automated labor, only 10 of its 8,000 workers contracted coronavirus during the pandemic. The meat supply remained secure, and the workers overseeing the series of advanced robots that fabricate pig carcasses remained largely safe.

Automation in meat fabrication would be a significant investment, however, as artificial intelligence is needed in order for these robots to perform carcass-specific evaluation and cutting. Because meatpacking production in the U.S. has just about fully recovered, spending that kind of capital could be a tough sell. “I’m guessing that managers are thinking, ‘You know, we’ve handled this pretty well,’” says MacDonald. “I’m not sure that we will see really major investments in the future of these plants unless they find themselves facing another wave and really getting dragged down.”

Others note that if such an investment meant a much more stable food supply, consumers might be ready to pay more for meat at the register. “During the last two to four decades, Americans have only spent about 6% of our disposable income on food. That’s the lowest of any country by far,” says Belk. “Clearly, potential food shortages during the pandemic caused the entire U.S. population to instantly recognize the value of a secure supply chain.”

In the rippling wake of the pandemic, it’s easy to see how a secure supply chain starts with a healthy workforce. Even if the industry doesn’t invest in a fleet of robot technology across the board, companies will have to invest in the health and wellness of their human workforce more than ever before to ensure that the shutdowns from the spring of 2020 never happen again.