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Author: Meat+Poultry

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Tomorrow’s consumer

By Bob Sims

December 2022

Tomorrow's
Consumer

Looking ahead, producers, processors and retailers must appeal to evolving demographics

Meat+Poultry

Antonio Diaz – stock.adobe.com

The COVID-19 pandemic makes it difficult to examine or analyze consumer trends in meat consumption and the role of meat in consumer diets over the last two to three years. The pandemic and supply chain issues during the pandemic, and those that followed and still linger, skew any short-term data available. Consumers, retailers, restaurants and all involved in the supply chain from farm to table face issues not seen in recent decades. However, data, analytics and insights provide a glimpse into how consumers shopped for, and ate, meat and poultry products during that time.

Meat motivation

In a sample size of 3,822 consumers, 210 Analytics LLC’s 2022 “The Power of Meat” report found the dominant driver for meat purchase decisions was a combination of product quality/appearance (60%), price per pound (48%) and total package price (39%). The next two factors were nutritional content (25%) and attribute claims such as organic, grass-fed, no antibiotics etc., at 23%.

Anne-Marie Roerink, principal at 210 Analytics, said that while consumers sometimes focus on the above average growth/trending areas of meat and poultry, such as those that emphasize attribute and better for you claims, etc., the large scale, traditionally raised meat and poultry products are the majority of sales. In most supermarkets, club stores and supercenters at least 90% of sales are of conventionally produced and processed meat and poultry.

“For those who emphasize sustainability, it is great to see that stores also have a growing availability of items such as organic, grass fed, and humanely raised,” Roerink said. “However, there is a danger in consumers believing that only those items address their areas of concern relative to better for them, better for the animal, better for the planet, and better for the community and workers. I believe it is important for us not to demonize conventionally raised meat but instead provide as many answers and transparency as to why all meat and poultry is nutritious, delicious, and humanely and sustainably raised.”

In addition, large-scale production and processing will likely remain a necessity as the global population continues to rapidly increase. In order to meet the increased consumer demand for meat and poultry, as well as the demand for transparency, technology will need to play a large role in conventional production.

“Consumers want transparency, traceability and to know the steak or chicken breast on their plate was sustainably raised,” said Steve Hixon, vice president of customer engagement, Midan Marketing. “You will likely see fewer human hands and more automation and analytic devices on the farm and in the production facility. The integration of a secure system monitoring in real time live animal health and gain, impact on land use and land regeneration will continue to develop.”

Cultivated meat’s place in the future protein market is still unclear, but it has gained considerable ground since its first appearance.

Today and tomorrow

Although no one has a crystal ball, some things happening today can be projected into the future. The entire grocery store, including meat and poultry, is seeing higher than average inflation. Retailers have begun to experiment with different unit sizes and in recent months there has been a shift to smaller packages.

“It is important for the industry to consider where the win nets out,” Roerink said. “Providing smaller unit sizes entails a risk for the department to lose some money toward a smaller purchase, but at the same time packages that are priced too highly may take certain consumers out of the purchase altogether.”

Another issue to deal with in the future affecting all forms of meat and poultry production and processing, and humankind, is the ever-growing population. The United Nations’ Department of Economic and Social Affairs projects the world’s population to reach 9.8 billion by 2050.

“Global population is another factor that will have an impact,” Hixon said. “As the world population grows to nine billion by 2050, the industry will need to continue to develop efficiencies related to production and logistics.”

With the transparency/sustainability/label attribute, etc., mindset of consumers growing out of a trend and becoming a mainstream attitude, there is no doubt it will affect consumer purchases into the future. Alternative proteins have gained a foothold in the market around this, as well as being an option to feed the growing population, and are on the mind of all in the meat industry, both within the alternative sector and the conventional and specialty animal protein sector. While both specialty animal proteins and alternative proteins are just a fraction of sales in the overall market, they are still worthy of attention.

Plant-based alternatives showed triple-digit growth early but slowed down significantly and has seen double-digit declines over the last year. The declines caused retailers to reevaluate merchandising decisions and move these items outside of the meat department, or just offer less SKUs overall.

“I do not believe, however, that the plant-based meat alternative trend has played out altogether,” Roerink said. “We are still too early in the innovation cycle to call it. We will continue to see new items become available with superior taste, texture and smell and as long as consumers are willing to continue to try them, I think we will continue to see ebbs and flows into the plant-based meat alternative market.”

Hixon said Midan’s research echoed Roerink’s sentiment.

“In research Midan did in 2021, almost half of meat consumers had a positive initial reaction when they heard the term ‘plant-based meat alternatives,’” he said. “However, in our 2021 research, only one in five surveyed meat consumers said they consume plant-based meat alternatives once a month or more. In the last year, we have seen a dramatic downfall in the number of plant-based units in the meat case.”

Cultivated meat, still not widely available, remains a question mark in terms of its future in the market. While some consumers believe it is a viable option, many don’t trust it for various reasons.

“Cultivated meat is an interesting area,” Roerink said. “People who have some concerns over the idea of eating meat and poultry from a health, animal, or planet point of view, like the idea of taking cells from the animal and growing it in a laboratory. However, the vast majority of Americans have some concerns relative to eating cultivated meat. A lot of these concerns center on food safety, taste, texture etc.”

According to Midan’s research, consumers have yet to make strong decisions on cultivated meat. As volume increases and pricing becomes more acceptable to consumers, Midan believes adoption of cultivated meat will exceed what has been seen for plant based.

“It will take time, but traditional animal protein production needs to be thinking about how to position their products to keep majority market share,” Hixon said.

Looking ahead

For the future processors need to pay close attention to inflation and how consumers react to it regarding their purchasing habits. Creating value for shoppers will help counter the spikes in prices, but processors must also understand value means different things to different demographics.

“For some, ‘value’ means the absolute lowest cost for highest number of meals – these consumers are buying more grinds and value cuts like roasts,” Hixon said. “For others, value-added products provide new flavors and save time. Others are choosing to save their dollars by recreating restaurant meals at home, and this opens a door for premium meats.”

According to the Power of Meat, year-on-year the price of groceries increased 15% and compared to pre-pandemic levels prices are up 25-27%, reinforcing inflation and the need for industry to respond. That on top of other financial pressures will affect shopper decision making.

“They are looking for more sale specials during a time when industry is having a hard time providing specials,” Roerink said. “People are looking for smaller packages, people are looking for proteins that are a little cheaper on the price per pound basis etc. So, figuring out how to continue to keep people in the category while not eroding the purchases of others will be an important conundrum to consider.”

She added that the meat purchasers themselves will change as time goes on, and companies need to adjust by paying attention to who is spending.

“If we look at the distribution of the food dollar in today’s market, we see that boomers and Gen X are the majority spenders. But if we look at growth, we see that millennials and Gen X are the ones who are driving a lot of the new dollars. So, we need to make sure that in our merchandising we address today’s shopper, but also start engaging tomorrow’s shopper.”

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Sustainability Strategies

By Erica Shaffer

November 2022

Sustainability
Strategies

Today’s meat and poultry processors carefully manage expectations to feed people, preserve the planet and deliver profits in the future

Meat+Poultry

Erica Shaffer, Sosland Publishing Co.

The United Nations expects the world’s population to increase by 2 billion people in the next 30 years – to 9.7 billion by 2050 from 7.7 billion and could peak at nearly 11 billion around 2100. To feed those people, global food production will need to increase 70% by 2050.

The same agency and others continue to sound the alarm about the negative impacts of climate change. In a report on Climate Smart Agriculture, the World Bank noted the role of agriculture in combating food insecurity while calling agriculture “… a major part of the climate problem.”

“It currently generates 19–29% of total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions,” according to the World Bank. “Without action, that percentage could rise substantially as other sectors reduce their emissions. Additionally, ⅓ of food produced globally is either lost or wasted.”

So, how will food manufacturers feed a growing world population without wrecking the planet? The future of protein production will need to be more sustainability focused than before as consumers increasingly focus on their own carbon footprint.

End-to-end sustainability

Livestock production and meat processing often are implicated for negative impacts on the environment. As a result, producers and processors are focused on implementing farm-to-fork sustainability practices and processes.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN stated that total emissions from global livestock per year represent 14.5% of all “anthropogenic GHG emissions, and cattle are the animal species responsible for the most greenhouse gas emissions representing about 65% of the livestock sector’s emissions.

Industry stakeholders note that farmers and ranchers have relied on conservation and sustainable production practices for decades. Any mitigations to GHG impacts will include animal agriculture. The difference will be steps the industry is taking now to improve future outcomes for the environment. So, segment watchers can expect to hear a lot more about conservation efforts, including regenerative agriculture.

“It’s nothing new, but it’s going back to what farmers have been doing, and nature has been doing, for millennia,” said Nadine Rich, marketing director at Denver-based Teton Waters Ranch. “When you look back several hundred years ago, there were 30 to 60 million bison not to mention deer and elk – ruminant animals that were grazing and moving along and leaving behind fertilizer and airing the soil. That continued to help with soil health. So, taking those types of tenets and doing that with managed grazing of cattle is our way to mimic nature’s systems that we know work.”

Managed grazing of cattle on open pastures of grassland is part of a cycle that enables the use of land that can’t be used for growing crops, but cattle can use for sustenance to create nutrient-dense beef for consumers. At the same time, dirt is becoming soil that is significantly healthier, has more water retention and sequestering carbon “… and creating and keeping in balance an ecosystem that brings life, or biodiversity, into that system,” Rich said.

Evolving animal husbandry practices will accompany mindful stewardship of the land as more consumers express interest in regenerative agriculture and look for product labels bearing label claims and certifications such as Non-GMO, free from and natural. The 2022 Power of Meat study found that many consumers believe that meat and poultry products that are better for them, the planet, animals and/or the workers are interconnected and 86% of people look for production claims on meat packages.

“One-third of consumers specifically look for claims-based meat, particularly ‘US-raised,’ ‘no added hormones’ and ‘no antibiotics use,’” the study said. “Claims-based meat grew over the record 2020 levels (+1.6%) and sales are significantly higher versus 2019 (+17.7%).”

“I think anything, that anything that’s better-for-you – and that could be grass-fed, organic, no antibiotics, no growth hormones – the consumer wants to know more about where their food is coming from and I think that’s a really good thing,” said Dana Ehrlich, chief executive officer and co-founder of Verde Farms, a Woburn, Mass.-based producer of natural meat. “Verde as a brand is both doing a lot of consumer research and focus groups, shop-alongs, quantitative research, qualitative research, to better understand our consumers’ needs and then reaching out to them through various mechanisms. That could be packaging on the shelf, that could be social, digital media campaigns and consumers are responding.”

On the processing side, companies such as Cargill, Tyson Foods and Maple Leaf Foods, to name a few, are investing in facility improvements such as energy-saving LED lighting; smart utility meters to measure and monitor consumption of electricity, gas, water; and outside air ventilation systems with energy recovery features among other upgrades.

And initiatives such as the Protein PACT for the People, Animals and Climate of Tomorrow, a joint venture by 12 organizations representing the meat, poultry and dairy industry along with animal feed and ingredients, aim to verify progress toward sustainability goals across all animal protein sectors. The North American Meat Institute (NAMI) developed a sustainability framework of more than 100 metrics developed through work with sustainability experts, supply chain partners and NAMI members.

Makers of plant-based meat alternatives continue to develop new products to keep consumers interested, but a shakeout in the segment could lie ahead.

Ongoing innovation

While animal protein consumption carries some of the blame for the world’s climate problem, plant-based meat alternatives are marketed as a solution. But a persistent downturn in sales has thrown plant-based meat alternative producers — and the category — for a loop, especially in the past year. Consumer and market research firm IRI found that sales for refrigerated plant-based meat alternatives are decelerating.

“Year-on-year growth started slowing in the second quarter of 2021 and turned negative in the third quarter,” IRI said. “Come November 2021, refrigerated plant-based meat alternative sales decreased 6.6% over November 2020. November sales were up 29.2% over the 2019 levels, but this is much lower than the gains seen in the first few quarters of the year.

“While 2019 and 2020 achieved much of its growth through expanded distribution, assortment only increased 5.3% in 2021 — making maintaining the growth rate much harder.”

With sales of meat alternatives continuing to see pressure from waning consumer interest and inflation impacts on meat shoppers, a segment shakeout could be in the cards for plant-based meat alternative companies.

In October, El Segundo, Calif.-based Beyond Meat Inc. announced plans to lay off approximately 200 employees, or roughly 19% of its workforce. The company also announced further reductions to its fiscal 2022 sales outlook to a range of $400 million to $425 million.

Redwood, Calif.-based Impossible Foods, in the same month, announced layoffs of 6% of its workforce as part of a reorganization plan primarily affecting roles that had become redundant or were incompatible with other parts of the plant-based meat maker’s reorganization plan.

Other companies, including meat processors like Canada’s Maple Leaf Foods Inc., have walked back investments in plant-based meat alternatives. In August, the company announced it was “rightsizing” its Greenleaf Foods, plant-based subsidiary after a financial shortfall due to demand that never occurred.

“We now understand why it did not materialize, and we no longer believe that it will materialize,” said Michael McCain, president and CEO of Maple Leaf Foods, during an Aug. 4 conference call to discuss the company’s second-quarter results. “So, we are altering our business model and dialing back our investment to reflect the goal of profitable growth …”

Chicago-based Upton’s Naturals makes vegan meat alternatives using seitan, a traditional Japanese food that is made by rinsing the starch from wheat and retaining the protein or gluten. Natalie Slater, marketing manager at Upton’s Naturals, has seen this trend of growth and contraction come and go since the 90s. The current cycle stands out because of the money invested in the segment during the past five years or so.

“A lot of it was really driven by brands that were backed by huge amounts of investments or brands that were bought out by conglomerates, or meat producers buying their plant-based counterparts,” Slater said. “And then after a lot of buzz around some of those products, then came lots of copycat products.

“I think what happens is that you get a lot of buzz and trust, and people try things and then there’s burnout or there’s some cannibalization there where there’s just too many of the same product.

“For a company like us that has never really chased trends, we feel like we have a secure spot in the market because we’re just really focused on making products with simple ingredients that taste good and are easy to cook. I think that’s a proven strategy for a lot of brands — just to stick with what you know and stick with what you do well, and you can ride out a lot of those, a lot of the trends, and so far, that’s worked.”

Going forward, consumer demand for the products — although not as torrid as in previous years — will encourage producers to keep innovating and offering new products. In September, Beyond Meat and Taco Bell launched Beyond Carne Asada Steak at locations in Dayton, Ohio. And in October, Beyond Steak launched at Kroger and Walmart stores nationwide, as well as at select Albertsons and Ahold divisions and other retailers across the United States.

“Beyond Steak is a highly anticipated expansion of our popular beef platform and we’re proud to introduce this innovative product to consumers nationwide,” said Dariush Ajami, chief innovation officer, Beyond Meat. “Beyond Steak delivers the taste and texture of sliced steak in a way that is better for both people and the planet.”

Impossible Foods expanded into full meal solutions with the launch of the company’s line of frozen plant-based entrees called Impossible Bowls. The alternative meat maker partnered with consumer packaged goods, meal kit and foodservice brands for plant-based versions of sausage ravioli, pizza and tacos, among other foods.

“And like all Impossible products, these meals are also healthier for the planet: choosing to enjoy our plant-based beef, chicken and pork in each entree accounts for less water consumption, land use and greenhouse gas emissions than their animal protein counterparts,” the company said.

Cultured meat advances

In 2010, Dutch scientists created pork in a lab using stem cells from pig muscles. By 2013, the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands unveiled a hamburger patty that was grown from bovine stem cells.

Kansas City, Mo.-based CRB Group, a full-service facility design, sustainable engineering, construction and consulting firm for biotech, pharma, food and beverage, and science and technology published an analysis of alternative protein manufacturing. In its Horizons: Alternative Proteins report, CRB examined significant challenges facing the segment including scalability, regulation, product safety and sustainability.

“Cell-based and plant-based meat, egg and dairy products are riding a wave of interest among consumers,” the report said. “To capitalize on this momentum, it is imperative for companies to develop, manufacture and bring to market new offerings as quickly as possible. This will require investing in new facilities and retrofitting existing food and beverage facilities with specialized equipment. To do that — and to do it fast — companies need to move away from traditional design-bid-build project delivery and embrace the trend toward turnkey project management.”

A significant challenge facing cultured meat producers is consumer acceptance. The 2022 Power of Meat study found that fewer than three in 10 meat eaters (29%) would be willing to try cultivated meat versus 40% who would not.

“Those who are willing to try cultivated meat point to securing the food supply and feeling it would be better for their health,” the study said. “The latter tend to be people who seek out meat and poultry raised without added hormones, antibiotics and several other production attributes. Other underlying drivers are animal welfare, food safety and the planet.

“Among those not willing to try cultivated meat, 63% are concerned that it is not natural. Other big concerns are that it is too processed or unsafe.”

Still, cultured meat startups have garnered a lot of attention and investment. Companies are creating chicken, lamb and fish without animal slaughter. Aleph Farms, Steakholder Foods, Eat Just, Meatable and other startups are advancing the science behind cultivated animal proteins.

Dutch food tech company Meatable is currently working on cultivating pork products, including sausages and dumplings with plans to launch the items in restaurants in Singapore by 2024. By 2025, Meatable hopes to expand into supermarkets.

Governments are supporting research into cultivated meat as a solution to food insecurity.

Eat Just Inc. secured a $25 million investment from private equity firm C2 Capital Partners to accelerate its growth in China. Plant-based egg alternatives and cultivated meat are part of China’s national blueprint for food security.

President Joe Biden issued an executive order directing Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) to submit a report assessing how to use biotechnology and biomanufacturing for cultured meat. And In October 2021, the USDA awarded Tufts University $10 million to establish the National Institute for Cellular Agriculture.

Alternative proteins face significant challenges including regulation, product safety and sustainability.

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Automation Mission

By Joel Crews

October 2022

Automation
Mission

The evolution of meat processing in the future depends less on humans and more on technology

Meat+Poultry

Georgia Tech Research Institute

laughtering and processing facilities where meat and poultry are manufactured have improved dramatically over the past 100-plus years. Comparing the abhorrent treatment of livestock and the people working in the plants in the early 20th century, as chronicled in Upton Sinclair’s 1906 infamous novel, The Jungle, to the operations of today’s processing plants demonstrates how innovative solutions and a commitment to continuous improvement by industry stakeholders have made game-changing improvements. Along with addressing the well-being of livestock and plant workers by vastly improving working conditions, the industry’s supply chain infrastructure has evolved significantly since Sinclair’s portrayal of the stockyards of Chicago, which also resulted in food-safety advances, improved food quality and efficient production at processing plants that operate using sophisticated technology, and increasingly, automation.

Industry thought leaders unanimously agree the processing plants of the future will include even more technology and refinements with goals of improving operational efficiency, increasing yields, minimizing the impact on the environment, and addressing a labor shortage that has hamstrung the industry for years.

Monitoring and analyzing operations based on cloud-based data collected from facilities is already being utilized by meat and poultry processors to streamline production and artificial intelligence technology applied at plants is proving beneficial in predicting and forecasting maintenance issues and identifying opportunities for operational improvements.

Making the leap

The industry’s biggest processors have done more than just dabble in innovations that were recently thought to be technology pipe dreams and most have committed resources to continue developing even more futuristic solutions for the next generation of meat and poultry processing plants. A focus on automation is a common theme among them.

For example, within the past decade São Paulo, Brazil-based JBS S.A. embarked on learning more about how it could apply machine learning at its 300-plus processing facilities. In 2015, JBS made a multi-million-dollar investment to own a controlling share of New Zealand-based Scott Technology. This year, JBS Foods Canada announced it was investing $71 million in a project with Scott Technology to make its Brooks, Alberta, warehouse fully automated.

“This new system will help reduce storage costs and errors and deliver improved inventory turns, while also improving worker safety as one box can weigh up to 110 lbs,” said John Kippenberger, chief executive officer of Scott Technology, when the project was announced in July. “It represents significant efficiencies and cost savings for JBS Foods Canada and will be the largest project of its kind for Scott to date.”

Late this past year, during a presentation at an investor meeting, Hormel Foods Corp.’s group vice president of supply chain, Mark Coffey, said the company routinely earmarks millions for automation in each year’s budget.

“With the uncertainty of labor and this tight labor supply, we are ramping up our investments in automation,” he said.

Earlier this year, Springdale, Ark.-based Tyson Foods Inc. announced it had 12 new plants under construction in the United States, with automation playing a critical role in all of them. At the beginning of its 2022 fiscal year, the company said it budgeted approximately $1.9 billion to invest in additional capacity and automation.

One of those projects is Tyson’s bacon processing plant, a $355 million, 400,000-square-foot project underway in Bowling Green, Ky. Gregg Uecker, Tyson’s senior vice president of operations of Prepared Foods is leading the project in terms of construction, design and equipment. And automation is a big part of the plant’s operation, which is scheduled to start up in late 2023. He said projects of this scale have to be built with a future-first mindset.

“We aren’t designing the plant for today and today’s processes and today’s problems,” he said. “We’re designing a plant so that 15 and 20 years from now it is still viable and still highly competitive.

“So, you have to think way differently. Where’s the world going to be? How do I not plan myself into a corner? How can I think about looking at technology?” he said, adding that there is a balancing act between building for the future and ensuring reliability when it comes time to execute production. “When it comes time to press the green button and start the plant, it’s got to make bacon,” he said.

He said the bacon plant is an example of how new plants address today’s issues while accounting for what might be tomorrow, which depends on the future-minded approach of the project leaders. Automation is an important part of the future, but so is an operations strategy, which is data based.

“We need to look at staffing and availability of labor, the cost of labor, but also making jobs easier, more precise and really allowing control systems to run them versus people running processes,” Uecker said. “Automation is a way of life. It’s not a project anymore. It’s kind of like it’s just part of how we work.

“And I think about data the same way. We have to collect more data from the processes. We have to get more insight from these processes with more sensors and more controls on anything that we do today than we ever did five years ago, 10 years ago, and now we have to make better decisions to reduce variability and increase the speed of business with that data.”

Poultry focused

Konrad Ahlin, PhD, Georgia Tech Research Institute, Aerospace, Transportation & Advanced Systems Laboratory, believes the time for widescale utilization of automation and robotics in the poultry industry is now. And he said once a foothold is established, the future is bright.

Ahlin, who is a relative newcomer to the food industry but an established expert when it comes to automation and robotics, is quick to point out the unique challenges that are inherent in applying robotics in meat processing applications, however.

“I see food manufacturing as the next big frontier for robotics. Because if you look at a lot of the factory manufacturing and areas where robotics are typically used, including assembly lines, often the robot’s job is set pre-planned ahead of time.”

But when the focus is on a product that is variable in size, texture and shape, “it’s a very challenging problem for robotics. And that’s one of the things that really got me interested in the field. As a roboticist, how are we going to advance robotics to face the incoming challenges of food manufacturing?” Ahlin said, not the least of which is the labor shortage.

Marble Technologies is focused on developing automation solutions to address one of the most pressing challenges facing red meat processors, which is a shortage of labor.

Two-arm advantage

He said that in traditional manufacturing applications it is common to see one robot arm designed for a singular task. These arms are typically large and operated in areas that are inaccessible to humans because of their size and weight and the danger they can pose to people. And while there might be multiple arms positioned close together, they are not designed to interact with each other to perform tasks. However, the concept of a “cobot,” a collaborative robot, has become more popular for manufacturing applications because they are usually less bulky and heavy and are less dangerous than their single-arm counterparts.

“The modern, interpretation of a “cobot” is a six- or seven-degree freedom robot arm, that is made to be operated within a human workspace if it has built-in safety precautions and is less bulky and heavy,” Ahlin said. “While less powerful, it wouldn’t be desirable for it to run into people or things, it also wouldn’t be catastrophic if it were to do so. What that allows for now is instead of just a robot arm, interacting within a human’s workspace, you could have multiple robot arms interacting within a shared workspace.”

For poultry processing applications, one area of research showing promise utilizes two interacting robotic arms to rehang chicken carcasses, which has obvious benefits in terms of labor savings and efficiency. This type of “cobot” application takes advantage of pairing a human to be the decision maker in the process with a robot that specializes in the manual labor task.

“So, is there a way to marry the manual labor of the robot with the decision making of a person? And our answer for that is to have this shared collaborative environment within the virtual world where the human and the robot can share information very naturally, and the person can then direct the robot and tell it where to pick up a bird using the suction gripper,” Ahlin said.

One of the benefits of this concept that has been proven in the lab is that the task can be completed remotely, with the human-based decision-making being done in one location to direct the robotic arm to hang a chicken carcass on a cone like those used in a poultry plant cut-up line.

“You don’t need to be in the same physical location, you just need to have an internet connection,” Ahlin said.

However, utilizing this technology is still in the research phase and likely years away from widespread implementation in plants. In the meantime, Ahlin is confident that progress will be made.

“I am very optimistic that in 10 years, the poultry processing in particular will look vastly different than it does today in terms of how much automation will take place,” he said.

“I don’t think the poultry industry needs to advance to some mythical level to be good enough for robotics,” Ahlin said. “I very much feel that robotics needs to advance to meet the challenges seen within the poultry industry. And robotics just recently has gotten to a level where it can start to address those challenges.”

Red meat and robots

When it comes to meat processing and automation, Chafik Barbar, chief executive officer of Marble Technologies, has gone all-in on the opportunities. He founded the Cambridge, Mass.-based company at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic after realizing the potential solutions automation hardware and software could deliver to the country’s plants that were reeling from the backlash of the virus. His company was founded on the basis that most processors are forced to operate with about 20% fewer workers than they need. Marble creates the software ‘brains’ for hardware to automate processing tasks using artificial intelligence to deliver automated solutions that can adapt to the variation in beef and pork products.

Growing up in Nebraska and a graduate of the University of Nebraska, Barbar has a background in agriculture and food technology. As a software developer, he co-founded GrainBridge in 2009, an Omaha-based start-up that provided financial risk management for crop and livestock producers. That company was acquired by ADM and Cargill in about 2018. He then moved to Massachusetts and earned an MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management and was determined to get back into food technology again, despite graduating during the pandemic.

He soon learned that one of the biggest post-COVID pain points in the meat industry was the labor shortage and began building a team of professionals who understand meat processing with technology experts that solved similar challenges in other industries.

“I’m trying to mash up meat science with other disciplines,” Barbar said.
He said that while many in the industry would criticize it for being slow to adopt automation, the argument could be made that there is an advantage to being a late bloomer. All eyes, it seems, are on the meat industry, due in part to COVID-19, consumer interest in food sourcing and global initiatives related to animal welfare, sustainability and consolidation concerns. Barbar added that the time is right for automation in the meat industry. He said the technology has been proven in other industries and is not only more affordable than in years past, but it is also evolving to address the variability issues inherent in automating meat-processing using more sophisticated learning software and artificial intelligence. He also pointed out that the labor pool for jobs in automation is attracting more candidates to the food industry from other industries given the level of software and hardware development and engineering skills required.

He said the need for solutions in this segment is understood by engineers and they aren’t deterred by working in what was once considered a less-than-glamourous industry.

“People understand what this is; they really get it and I’m not having to explain the problem I’m solving,” he said.

He added that fortunately for automation companies like Marble, the industry’s largest players have budgeted tens of millions of dollars each year that are earmarked specifically for these solutions. Funds for enhancing and growing plant operations are also available in the form of government grants while venture capital in agri-food tech has more than quadrupled in the past five years, fueling the momentum to back any type of solutions that address supply chain problems.

He said all the factors are lining up to make this a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to address a longtime challenge in the industry and to boost it forward by 20 years.
“Ten years from now, I want people to look at the meat industry and talk about it as an example of automation,” Barbar said.

The most obvious solutions automation offers processors, for example in the pack-off area of a meat plant is in reducing head counts but not eliminating humans from the equation altogether. Instead, Barbar is offering processors human-in-the-loop automation and going from 20 to 30 people in a product sorting area of a primary beef processing operation, for example, and reducing it to four people.

He pointed out that those four people play a crucial role in the process because they serve as quality assurance workers who are the last line of defense to give products a final look before boxing and shipping. There is still much more to the processes than just flipping a switch and walking away.

“We’re still a long time away from this technology being lights out,” Barbar said.
He said the human factor is a necessary evil in the meat processing industry, unlike the automotive industry. Because no two carcasses are alike, dealing with consistency can be an automation hiccup, but software and visioning systems are available to deal with product variability.

“Where it gets real hard with variability is not the variability of the product, it’s the variability of the process. What happens on the fabrication floor is one chaotic process. It’s my argument that it’s man-made chaos. It’s not, God-made chaos. That is something we can fix long term but not Day One.”

He said real-world applications might target one process, such as trimming on a chuck line station and either making it completely automated without humans or use technology to make the first four trimming cuts and then conveying that to a single person at the end of the line to make the final cut or two to ensure it looks correct.
“I just saved the human four swipes with a knife,” Barbar said, “but we’re still pretty far from making automation work as well as humans. Humans are just phenomenal.”
While many meat companies have converted their inventory system and order pulling processes to a light’s out, human-free operation, that level of automation can’t be expected on the fabrication side.

Barbar said when it comes to opportunities for complete automation, “You see bits and pieces; you see robots here and there in pork, but still to a large degree, it’s pretty fragmented. You see automation kind of being sprinkled all over the place, but there’s just not these complete solutions that are mature enough to go in and solve for the reality of how these plants work.”

Barbar said the most opportunities are in retrofitting automation solutions for existing plants.

“That’s where the pain is,” he said. “I can sit here and design for new facilities, but I wouldn’t really be moving the needle for the industry.”

Marble’s solutions for today address the packaging area and the pack-off operations.
“I’m going after the end of the process; I’m going to the front of the process. It’s just my best approach to how do you tackle this beast.”

Marble Technologies creates the software ‘brains’ for hardware to automate processing tasks, such as product sorting, to deliver automated solutions that can adapt to the variation in beef and pork processing.

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A trusted voice

By Laurie Gorton

March 2022

A trusted
voice

Sosland Publishing’s protein platform builds its success on a solid foundation of industry knowledge and connections.

Meat+Poultry

Successful trade magazines make their mark by earning reader respect and acceptance. They must cover complex subjects in a timely manner, provide insight into today’s concerns and look ahead to tomorrow’s trends, all done accurately and authoritatively.


“MEAT+POULTRY’s mission is to offer access, trust and credibility,” said Dave Crost, publisher of M+P. “That’s what we bring to our readers and advertisers.”


In its nearly 70 years, the magazine moved from a regional journal for West Coast meat processors and brokers to national – and recently, international – circulation and editorial coverage. It does so in print and, increasingly, digital formats. Its editorial assignment is to examine knotty technological advances, complex marketing matters and thorny labor, regulatory and business management issues. The magazine has also earned a reputation for its operationally focused features based on tours of dozens of meat and poultry processing plants during the course of most years.


“Our magazine is the meat industry’s leading information source,” Crost said. “Our coverage balances business and trends. We look at what’s over the next hill, at what’s happening in the plant and what’s developing with the technology.”


Over its history, M+P has broken many high-interest stories. It was the first among meat industry publications to cover workforce diversity, the impact of ethanol production on the feed-dependent industry, religion in the workplace, swine flu, animal welfare and, even, plant-based proteins and cultured meat production.


Meat plant operations are a major component.


“When I explain our operations coverage, I tell people that we put our focus on the loud part of the plant and cover the story in hardhats and boots,” said Joel Crews, editor of M+P. “We are out on the operations floor to do our reporting.”


“We cover the business from boardroom to plant floor,” Crost added. “We respect the industry, and they respect and trust us. Trust among the readership is vital to us.”


Trust, Crost added, fosters access.


“That’s why we get invited into facilities others don’t,” Crews said. “No one is better at that than us.”

Today’s MEAT+POULTRY

In Sosland Publishing’s portfolio, MEAT+POULTRY is the protein-focused platform. The company acquired the magazine in 1996. As company Chairman Charles Sosland explained, there has always been an important link between grain and commercial livestock. “Grain-based feeds sustain and finish herds,” he said.


Its circulation stands at 23,082 print and 3,573 digital for a unique total qualified circulation of 25,025, per the B.P.A. audit of June 2020. Job functions of recipients include the C-suite, plant operations, production, R&D, QC, marketing, sales and purchasing.


“Consolidation continues to happen in the meat industry,” Crost observed, “but we’ve seen our digital circulation rise substantially.”


Compared with the meat industry of the 1950s through the 1980s, industry demographics have changed, thus altering the magazine’s circulation profile. “Like the industry, our readership is still male dominated,” Crews said, “but more women are coming into the business, and the workforce is growing more diverse and inclusive. It has also started to trend younger, which you can readily see at industry conferences and conventions.”


“Companies need young, highly educated staff to manage technology and operations,” Crost said. “They aggressively recruit from other industries and actively seek engineering graduates from major universities.”


The magazine pushes hard to reach these new demographics. “That’s why our digital products are so important to M+P,” Crews said. “That’s why we strive to offer original content through our digital media, not limiting it to the magazine’s contents only.”

Out of the West

Launched in January 1955 by Oman Publishing, based in the San Francisco Bay area, and originally titled Western Meat Industry, the magazine was specifically written for meat handlers and processors in the far Western states. It was sent to approximately 10,000 recipients. It had two full-time writer/editors covering the northern California area and tapped experienced business news reporters throughout in the 11-state region. Its lead-off issue carried 48 folio pages, printed primarily in black and white, with red as a spot color on the cover and several ads.


In the first issue, founder Donald Oman wrote to his new readers: “There is little doubt in the minds of men who know this western industry best that the West needs and deserves its own magazine.”


This was an auspicious time. In 1960, Oman reported to readers, “During this past five years, western population has increased by 3 or 4 million. Meat production and consumption have increased. The industry has seen many changes and improvements. Two more western states – Alaska and Hawaii – have been admitted to the US, making the western empire bigger and more closely knit than ever before.”


Typical of magazines of this era, Western Meat Industry reported extensively on industry association meetings and conventions. “At that time, the editors and publishers were very tight with the West Coast meat associations,” Crews said. And like all good reporters, they used these relationships to gain story leads and insights.


For its first 20 years, Western Meat Industry served beef, pork and lamb processors and purveyors in the now-14 western states exclusively. Availability of frozen distribution and advances in packaging technology were prompting those readers to venture over the Rocky Mountains and into national distribution. The magazine attracted the attention of a larger audience.


“We have been urged in recent years to give our annual special June ‘Frankfurter & Sausage Issue’ wider distribution,” Oman wrote in 1970. Recognizing the opportunities to gain audience and advertising revenue, the magazine officially changed its name to Meat Industry and raised qualified circulation to 16,000 recipients at more than 11,000 federal and state-inspected meat plants throughout the United States.


Steve Bjerklie, former editor of M+P (1980-96), summed up the move: “In short, the regional industries were shrinking by the mid-1970s, and the big companies were all going national. Advertisers followed, so it only made sense for Western Meat Industry to become Meat Industry in 1975.”
Writing to the Meat Industry audience in January 1970, Oman and Michael Alaimo, associate publisher, explained their reasoning.


“Most of the editorial contents of our monthly issues are unavailable from any other convenient source, so we will not be duplicating editorial service already available elsewhere,” they wrote. “Western packers and processors have had easy access to this kind of information in our magazine for years, and we like to think it is one of the reasons why there are so many progressive, well-informed packers in the West.”


Editorial and publishing offices remained in the San Francisco area.

Editorial driven

From the start, the editorial content of MEAT+POULTRY has centered primarily on production and packaging technology, industry news and business strategy. The first issue carried articles about a new supermarket meat center, two new meat plants and the addition of a new meat packaging department along with news of company, personnel and association activities plus new products from suppliers.


This blend of news, operations, technology and association matters set the early pattern for the magazine. As the years progressed, the magazine added technology reports written to help readers understand highly complex topics. It developed a schedule of special issues devoted to the industry’s products, such as portion-control meats, burgers, hot dogs and sausage, deli meats and, most recently, barbecue along with an annual Buyer’s Guide and pre- and post-convention issues.


From its launch to today, the magazine benefited from a devoted editorial staff and a stellar assortment of contributing writers.


In the January 1960 edition, Oman announced the promotion of Alaimo to editor from associate editor. By 1977, Alaimo also carried the title of associate publisher, and he would devote his career to the magazine, rising to owner and publisher during the 1980s.


Another individual long associated with M+P, Bjerklie joined Oman Publishing in 1980 as an assistant editor, progressing to associate editor, with a brief stint as assistant to the publisher. Alaimo continued to act as editor until 1989 when Bjerklie was named managing editor and shortly thereafter became editor.


“When I came aboard in 1980, Katie Supinski was managing editor, Janet Basu was associate editor, and Judy Bischoff was assistant editor,” Bjerklie recalled. Basu moved into freelancing a short while later. In the mid-1990s, he brought in Keith Nunes, as managing editor and Zack Stentz as assistant editor.


“We published some of what I consider the best trade journalism anywhere and certainly the best the meat industry had ever seen,” Bjerklie said.


Bjerklie continued as editor until 1996, when Sosland Publishing purchased M+P, and he then became a contributing editor.


One of the most remarkable aspects of M+P is its outstanding roster of contributing editors. Many of the meat industry’s thought leaders are on that list, and their articles have bolstered the magazine’s content and burnished its reputation.


In the 1970s, the magazine offered “Doc Williams’ Forecast”, a monthly column by Willard F. Williams, a leading market analyst who specialized in livestock forecasts and futures trading. “The Knocking Pen” offered folksy observations made by an anonymous writer, who asked to be identified only as “a West Coast packer.”


In 1987, M+P listed among its contributing editors three university professors, two lawyers, a retired meat packer, a director of R&D and a livestock handling specialist.


“Our contributors have made a real difference in the credibility of the magazine,” Crews said. “Temple Grandin is America’s foremost expert in animal welfare, and her ‘From the Corral’ column has been exclusively with M+P for about 40 years.”


As M+P readers know, Grandin possesses an expertise in animal handling with a unique perspective. At the time Bjerklie first interviewed her on this subject, she was already consulting with major beef and pork packers. Her theory that mishandled and mistreated animals meant poorer quality meat has changed animal management practices substantially. Being autistic, her gift of visual thinking allows her to provide unique animal handling solutions and livestock handling design consulting with a unique approach.


Columnist Steve Kay, publisher of Cattle Buyers Weekly, is an icon in the red meat industry and has contributed his editorial expertise to M+P for more than three decades. Contributor Steve Krut, another living legend in the industry, writes “Small Business Matters” to spotlight this innovative segment and inform readers about their larger business concerns. Richard Alaniz, the magazine’s labor correspondent of more than 20 years, taps his considerable legal experience to write about what owners and executives have to think about as an employer. Donna Berry and Bernard Shire complete today’s roster of M+P contributing editors with their expertise in ingredients development, packaging and Washington, DC, developments, respectively.


“The contributors bring a tremendous amount of industry knowledge,” Crews said.


About the time the magazine expanded to national distribution, it introduced its annual Red Book. This special issue, now published in May, assembles a comprehensive guide to suppliers of equipment, products and services along with a roster of industry associations.


The magazine’s Salary Survey, initiated in the 1990s, is unique among the trade magazines serving the meat and poultry industry.


“No one has ever done this in our field, yet it’s been offered for more than 30 years now,” Crews said. “Like all research-based special reports, they take considerable time and resources, but they are well read.”


Today, the survey is conducted by Kansas City, Mo.-based Cypress Research.

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Acquisition mode

In 1996, Sosland Publishing acquired MEAT+POULTRY from Oman Publishing. Charles Sosland praised the magazine for its reputation and history, describing it as the leading publication in its field.


“Acquisition of M+P extends Sosland’s reach farther into food processing and complements as well as reinforces our commitment to serving grain-based foods.” Sosland wrote to the magazine’s readers at the time.


“We already knew Mike Alaimo,” Sosland said. “We saw this as a way to expand into additional food categories. And through feed, the meat and poultry industry has a grain connection.”


The change of ownership opened new vistas for the magazine.


“Sosland [Publishing] gave us the opportunity to scale up our efforts,” Nunes said. “I wanted to push the magazine forward, beyond what we could have accomplished at Oman.”


One dream was to develop a robust website.


“We had a template,” Nunes continued. “We could not have done it without Sosland.”


Another goal was publishing up-to-the minute reporting on food safety. About the time M+P joined Sosland, the tragic E. coli O157:H7 outbreak happened. Concerns about bovine somatotropin (BST), an artificial growth hormone, and bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, a.k.a. “mad cow disease”) added urgency to this subject. Also, USDA was about to mandate use of Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point (HACCP) programs to improve food safety.


Digital media capabilities at the new parent company enabled M+P to later roll out Sosland’s Food Safety Monitor e-newsletter as a joint project with sister publication Food Business News.


The new owner moved the magazine’s editorial and advertising offices to Kansas City, Mo. The purchase and move placed the publication in the traditional and geographical heart of the industry.


Charles Sosland was the magazine’s first publisher at its new home. In 1998, Chuck Jolley, a marketing communications executive from a major packaging supplier to the meat industry, was named publisher. When he left in 2004, another Sosland executive stepped in as interim publisher until Crost was named to that role for M+P in 2005.


In 2005, Sosland launched Food Business News and tapped Nunes to be its first editor. M+P then appointed Crews as its editor. He joined the publication in 2000 as managing editor.


“For a few months, my job was roughly 50:50 M+P and FBN,” Nunes said, “but that arrangement rapidly tapered into more of a consulting role as Joel and Dave picked up the ball and ran with it.”


Today, the M+P editorial staff consists of five full-time editors. Executive Editor Kimberlie Clyma arrived at Sosland Publishing in 2006 as associate editor of Baking & Snack magazine. With previous experience in the meat industry, she became the managing editor of M+P in 2010 and was promoted to her current position in 2019. Bob Sims, named M+P features editor in 2016, started at the company as a staff writer for Bake magazine. Erica Shaffer is the magazine’s digital media senior editor, having served in similar roles with Sosland since 2009, and works with Ryan McCarthy, digital media editor, who joined the company in 2016.


Sosland acquired Meat Processing, a competing magazine, from Watt Publishing (now Watt Global Media) in 2006.


“The intention was to fold Meat Processing into M+P,” Sosland said. “The circulation, which included some international recipients, was the biggest part of the acquisition.”


M+P celebrated its 60th year of publication in 2015 with a series of articles that traced the industry decade by decade. These reports included summaries by Maureen Ogle, a historian and author of “In Meat We Trust”; Steve Kay; and Steve Bjerklie, leading off with his extensive interview of Rosemary Mucklow, emeritus executive director of the North American Meat Institute, about the industry as it was in the late 1950s through the 1960s.


M+P is no longer solely a print publication, it now publishes a variety of digital products.


“Digital is a necessity for content delivery today,” Crost said. “You have to communicate with readers in the manner they choose.”


He explained that the M+P audience tends to prefer print, but because reader demographics continue to skew younger, digital gets increasing attention. The electronic side supports numerous channels and a dynamic website, meatpoultry.com. The newest is Bacon Business News, the first and only monthly e-newsletter dedicated to all things bacon. A weekly podcast was also launched in 2018.


“The delivery platform has changed,” Crost said. “No matter where you are or what time it is, you can access our content around the world. You can display information in a readable fashion through a channel you prefer.”

A changing industry

In the 1950s, as the American economy shifted out of World War II necessities, a new model for cattle feeding emerged, cutting out seasonality concerns. Stockyards were eliminated in favor of finishing closer to slaughter. Trucking shouldered out railroad transportation, and unlike rail, trucking was unregulated.


“At the time Western Meat Industry was founded, the meat industry in the US was still largely regional, with just a few national companies,” Bjerklie said. “The industry in the West was particularly robust, and in fact, there were two San Francisco-based trade associations representing western meat companies, the Western States Meat Association and the Pacific Coast Meat Association. They eventually merged in the 1980s.”


By the 1960s, industry norms were being broken left and right. The top-heavy corporate structures of the old guard, the so-called Top Five, were crumbling. New plants now side-stepped old-fashioned multi-story structures for more efficient single-story layouts; moreover, the industry’s most advanced facilities opted for rural settings and eliminated unions altogether.


Customers were changing, too, with supply chain relationships favoring grocery store chains over middlemen merchants. Meat began to sell as a value-added item and ingredient for other food products.


Poultry feeders brought down the consumer price of chicken and became a serious competitor for the protein portion of the plate. They did it by integrating operations from hatcheries and feed mills through processing.
“Our magazine renamed itself Meat Industry to be able to bring in coverage of poultry,” Nunes said. “And of course, the big poultry show posed many advertising opportunities.”


All these subjects found their way into the pages of the magazine.
“Refrigeration and freezing technology – that changed everything and created a national/global industry,” Crews said. “Vacuum packaging technology extended the shelf life of products and facilitated increased distribution across the country.”


By the 1970s, automation had started to play a much larger role in the meat industry.


“It’s been mostly used at the end of processing lines (packaging and logistics), but there is a strong push for it upstream because labor shortages in plants have been a huge problem that is only getting worse,” Crews said.

Consumerism, regulation

As the 1960s flowed into the 1970s, meat and poultry purveyors encountered even more tectonic change. “Boxed beef became the norm for many processing companies versus receiving shipments of primals and subprimals,” Crews noted.


Industry consolidation and vertical integration on the slaughter side created economies of scale and reduced the price of meat to the point everyone could afford it. Within a decade, poultry emerged as the nation’s most popular animal protein.


Contract poultry production became a primary market. Niche markets began to rise, and foodservice flexed its supply chain muscles, creating franchise-based businesses that could provide a chain operator’s every need from hamburger patties to buns, ketchup packets and cleaning chemicals, all distributed from one location, i.e. the “single source” vendor.


Biotechnology in the form of protein somatotropin (pST) entered herd management practices.


Although powerful labor unions had journeyed well into their long twilight decline, they still put up a furious fight as the industry reshaped itself around newly dominant companies.


“In the meantime, consumerism took the wheel to steer the food industry in new directions,” Crews said. The result of 50 years of federal legislation and policy affirmed consumers’ rights and nurtured and encouraged consumer consciousness.


USDA inspection ramped up.


Advancing technology continued to occupy the pages of the magazine. For example, the February 1975 issue carried a special three-part report on mechanically deboned meat for making sausages and other meat products intended for human consumption.


In 1980, the Food and Drug Administration issued its first Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which suggested consumption of “alternate proteins” for a part of an individual’s daily intake of food.


“Features about regulatory issues, from labeling to beef grading, from environmental rules to access to export markets as well as dealing with unions became staple material,” Bjerklie said. “From 1980 on, I don’t think we published an issue that didn’t have at least one story about regulatory matters, and usually the focus was on Washington, DC, rather than state capitals.”


The magazine swiftly reported the impact of the 1993 E. coli O157:H7 episode that occurred on the West Coast. That tragedy upended processing systems and inspection protocols. It was reported in the February 1993 issue, and later the same year, new regulatory powers over pathogens were granted to USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS).


By 1995, the HACCP protocol – little known before 1990 – became the foundation of federal meat inspection.


When introducing Sosland Publishing as M+P’s new owner in the October 1996 issue, Sosland commented on the importance of food safety initiatives to the industry and the magazine. “The Pathogen Reduction/Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point final rule is going to change this industry,” he said, noting that sanitary operating procedures, such as HACCP plan development, implementation of pathogen intervention technologies, plant floor design and layout, as well as equipment maintenance, would be regular topics for the magazine’s in-plant operations features.


Consumerism turned to the animal welfare practices of meat processors. M+P covered the 2008 voluntary recall by a California meat packer of 143 million lbs of frozen beef products – the biggest recall to date – following an investigation into animal cruelty.


Technology isn’t immune to regulatory attention either. “A few landmark recalls resulted in equipment companies producing machines that feature sanitary design and easy-to-clean configuration,” Crews said.

Going global, managing local

By the end of the 1990s, US meat exports climbed to 8.1% of meat and poultry sales. Coverage of this increasingly important activity was added under Sosland.


The other side of the “going global” coin – animal diseases – has been a longtime thorn in the industry’s side, according to Crews. This problem has global consequences, and the magazine covers it on an ongoing basis. A 2003 case of BSE in the United States, for example, cost the American meat industry $16 billion, mostly in lost exports. Japan, a key market, did not reopen to US beef until 2013. Other coverage by M+P documented how porcine epidemic diarrhea virus (PEDv) devastated pork production around the world and how African swine fever and avian influenza have wreaked havoc in China and Europe in the late 2010s.


“The impact on US processors of such matters, and their coverage in M+P, are largely a product of the growing international nature of the meat and poultry industries,” Crews said. Many of the industry’s largest companies are not only active in the United States, they are global.


Public and media scrutiny of the industry continues unabated. In 2002, it focused on Lean Finely Textured Beef (LFTB), what the critics villainized as “pink slime.”


Crews observed, “That was a recent example of what can happen when media misinformation fuels misunderstanding among consumers.”


He also noted the recent controversies over country-of-origin labeling (COOL) and the legal challenge to the beef checkoff program. Both continue to receive M+P editorial coverage.


Another issue local to the United States that was examined in depth by the magazine and its digital offerings was the diversion of corn from animal feed channels, especially poultry, to ethanol production. Federal support of ethanol worsened the tight supply situation. With the bloom fading from the ethanol rose, this concern has subsided.


As M+P’s reader audience entered the 2020s, magazine editors planned to give more attention to increasing productivity and efficiency by covering the way processors link multiple operations, even multiple locations and plants, via secure cloud-based systems to monitor production and streamline processing.


“In recent years, we have taken our coverage further upstream to include animal production and downstream through packaging, distribution and into retail channels,” Crews said. “We still have more of a micro focus on the processing side of the business.”


The emphasis on operations is deliberate. “What you see in the plant is changing the business and the magazine. What’s coming off the packaging lines is altering the marketplace. And MEAT+POULTRY is ready to report this to our readers, in print and digital formats alike,” Crost said.

Editorial excellence accolades

Over the years, several MEAT+POULTRY articles received awards for editorial excellence.


During the late 1980s, a three-part series about labor and another series about contract farming in the poultry industry won top awards, according to Steve Bjerklie, former editor of M+P. Keith Nunes, former editor, also assisted a Wall Street Journal reporter with a story about the poultry industry that won a Pulitzer Prize. The magazine also garnered a Jessie H. Neal Award in 1998 for editorial commentary. This was given by the American Business Media (now known as SIIA).


“More recently, we won Tabbie Gold Awards in 2019, and a Bronze Award in 2021,” said Editor Joel Crews. One went to M+P’s Annual Sausage Report, while another was for an editorial commentary. “We were also named one of the Top 25 features for a story on inclusion and diversification,” he added. The 2021 award recognized M+P’s Family Business Focus special report. The Tabbies are given by the Trade Association of Business Publications International.


“We have also had numerous regional awards from the American Society of Business Publication Editors,” Nunes said.

Posted on

Humane touch

By Joel Crews

December 2021

Humane
touch

Processors continue to elevate the importance of animal welfare.

Meat+Poultry

Heritage Image Partnership Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo

The relationship between man and beast has biblical roots and has long since garnered the attention of ancient philosophers and theologians.


“It matters not how man behaves to animals because God has subjected all things to man’s power,” Thomas Aquinas wrote.


The perception that animals, especially livestock, were merely a tool to facilitate the needs of people, including performing work and as serving as a source of food, was the subject of noteworthy philosophers.


According to the writings of Aristotle, “Plants exist for the sake of animals and brute beasts for the sake of man.”


Temple Grandin, PhD, a professor of animal science at Colorado State University and an expert on animal welfare and livestock handling designs, sees the relationship between humans and animals differently. The 74-year-old icon recently recalled a trip to Israel years ago when she conducted an informal survey of Hebrew-speaking residents about what they thought man having dominion over fish, birds, cattle and wild animals of the earth meant.


“Just about every one of them said it meant stewardship. That’s a very different meaning,” she said.


“That’s in the Bible,” Grandin said. “There was some concern about animals even back then.” Grandin, an educator, scientist, engineer, author of dozens of books and the subject of an Emmy-award winning movie, has dedicated her long career to improving the lives of animals.

Origins across the pond

The United Kingdom was ahead of the United States with regard to legislation related to humane treatment of livestock in the early 1930s as evidenced by the passage of the Slaughter of Animals Act of 1933, which required mechanical stunning of cows and electrical stunning of pigs.


Meanwhile, in the United States, the growth of the meat industry in the early to middle 20th century was facilitated by the establishment of stockyards in Chicago, Kansas City and New York and the use of feedlots across the country. The expansion of a transportation infrastructure brought exponential growth in livestock production as transportation advances made moving live animals from farms to feedlots to processing plants much more prevalent. The development of refrigerated transportation via railways and on trucks also served to distribute more meat to more states. As demand, production and consumption grew, so too did the awareness of how animals in the food supply chain were treated.


About 25 years after England’s formation of the Humane Slaughter Association (HSA) in 1911, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the federal Humane Methods of Slaughter Act into law. Prior to the 1958 Humane Slaughter Act, there were no laws regulating humane slaughter practices. The initial law focused on ensuring that proper methods were used to render cattle insensible before shackling, hoisting, casting or cutting. The law applied only to companies selling meat to the US government and specifically addressed the stunning of cattle, pigs, sheep and other mammals, and did not address the stunning of birds. It also did not apply to religious slaughter, such as halal or Kosher.


The Humane Methods of Slaughter Act of 1978 was passed as a follow-up to the earlier law, addressing cattle handling practices during the slaughtering process. According to the USDA, the intention of the 1978 act was to prevent needless animal suffering, improve meat quality, decrease financial losses, and ensure safe working conditions. Compliance with the Act was ensured by USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service veterinarians overseeing slaughter at beef packing plants in addition to FSIS inspectors on the kill floor. The veterinarian enforced humane slaughter methods throughout the plant by observing methods of slaughter, ensuring corrective action was taken, and reporting inhumane treatment of cattle.

Temple Grandin garnered credibility in the industry after she designed the cattle handling systems for all of Cargill’s plants in North America.

Poultry’s time

The Federal Poultry Inspection Service was established in 1926, which initially provided inspection of live birds at New York area train stations and poultry vending locations.


Vertical integration in the poultry industry, especially during the 1960s, served as an opportunity for producers to utilize new biological and pharmaceutical technologies that would advance broiler welfare for years to come. By the mid ‘70s, the poultry industry had evolved as researchers discovered the important role of nutrition, implemented disease eradication programs and took advantage of genetic-based improvements in the breeding process.


More recently, the National Chicken Council (NCC) developed the NCC Animal Welfare Guidelines and Audit Checklist in 1999, which has been adopted by chicken producers and processors to ensure the humane treatment of chickens. The guidelines are species specific, focusing on broilers and broiler breeders and address every phase of a chicken’s life to make science-based recommendations for the proper treatment of broiler chickens.


“The USDA has requirements regarding humane slaughter under the federal Poultry Products Inspection Act, and the slaughter process is monitored on a continuous basis by FSIS inspectors,” said Ashley Peterson, PhD, senior vice president of scientific and regulatory affairs with the NCC. “Companies may receive a non-compliance report relating to animal welfare and must take corrective action when they are not in compliance with FSIS directives.”


Peterson said the evolution in technology in chicken production has advanced broiler welfare, including housing ventilation systems, automated and sensor-based control of feed, water and temperature controls in production facilities as well as vaccines and nutrition regimens that advance the health of more broilers. She said consumers today want to know food animals are treated well by food companies they hold responsible for animal welfare.

Perception matters

The Humane Methods of Slaughter Act of 1978 signaled a significant tide shift in the industry and a heightened awareness among consumers about the treatment of animals. The perception of animals’ role in society among humans has slowly evolved and the concept of animal rights and animal welfare began to be reconsidered as research about animals’ ability to feel pain, sense fear and possibly possess souls became more widely held.


One of the world’s most-respected experts on animal welfare and animal behavior, Grandin said the first step in the slow process of improving animal handling in the industry was accepting that livestock have senses similar to humans. As a person with autism, Grandin said she and the animals she has dedicated her life to share the traits of being visual thinkers and hyper-sensitive to sensory-based stimulants.
“One of the first things that happened a long time ago was recognizing that animals can feel pain,” Grandin said, pointing out that for many decades, neuroscientists confirmed that animals experience fear.


Grandin was one of the first researchers published in the Journal of Animal Science addressing fear as a psychological stressor experienced by livestock during handling and transport. That groundbreaking research, titled, “Assessment of Stress During Handling and Transport,” was published in 1997.


“I got the ‘fear’ word and some of that neuroscience brain research into the animal science literature, in the veterinary literature, because for a long time you couldn’t say that,” Grandin said.


“It is completely recognized today that animals have fear; that animals have emotional systems.”


Despite the passage of the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act of 1978, animal welfare practices in the meat and poultry industry were sorely lacking. Grandin said even after ‘78, what was considered normal was nothing short of atrocious.


“The ‘80s were about the worst,” she said, and she realized there were opportunities for her to be a change agent. Another emerging force pushing consumers and food companies to change at that time were animal activist groups, including the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS).


By the time the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act of 1978 was passed, Grandin had earned her master’s degree from Arizona State University, where she was a frequent visitor at plants there, including the Swift plant in Tolleson, Ariz., as well as a Cudahy pork plant near Phoenix. She recalled each company proudly posted signs in their lobbies promoting the use of humane slaughtering practices, realizing the importance of animal welfare well ahead of many companies. In the late 1980s, Grandin moved to Illinois to pursue a doctorate at the University of Illinois.


Her early work focused on improving chute systems. In the 1980s and early ‘90s, Grandin developed the industry’s first-ever center-track restrainer system, based on a concept from researchers at the University of Connecticut. Recognizing it as a more humane option to V-restrainers, Grandin adapted the university’s plywood prototype and modified it for use in slaughter plant environments. Establishing the correct use of the center-track restrainers in the early 1990s proved to be challenging, however, as some plant operators didn’t always use them correctly.


It was frustrating, Grandin said, to realize that some company’s operators assumed throwing money at a problem would automatically fix it.


“There were a lot of these systems out there, but a lot of people just tore them up and wrecked them. They were not managing. Too often people would just buy equipment and think it was automatic management,” she said, which was simply not true.


The same false mindset applied in adapting stunning technology in slaughter plants.


In one of the first slaughter plants she worked in, the Swift plant in Arizona, Grandin worked with engineers to eliminate two large stun boxes that held two cattle at a time, which often triggered stress in the animals. She replaced it with a V-restrainer and a ramp system (which Grandin referred to as the “stairway to heaven”). The center-track restrainer ultimately replaced the V-restrainer, but equipment alone isn’t a solution.


“You’ve got to maintain it,” she said, “and realize equipment evolves. The V-restrainer was a big improvement in high-speed plants over stun boxes. And the center-track restrainer was another improvement.”

Credibility counts

It was also during this period that Grandin was beginning to design curved chute systems to more effectively drive cattle and pigs. And her expertise in animal behavior and engineering was being recognized by prominent industry processors.


“In the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, I laid out handling systems for all the Cargill beef plants in North America,” she said. In the same period, Grandin worked with the American Meat Institute’s (AMI) Janet Riley (who was then the vice president of public affairs) to write the “Recommended Animal Handling Guidelines for Meat Packers,” which was published in 1991 and was the industry’s first voluntary animal welfare guidelines for meat packers. In 1997, Grandin went on to write “Good Management Practices for Animal Handling and Stunning,” which included an objective scoring system based on the guidelines to be used as a tool to measure and manage animal welfare practices at meat plants. The system measured stunning efficacy, insensibility, vocalization, prod use and falling down.


Jerry Karczewski, who was working as an operations manager at Taylor Packing in the 1990s recalled reading an article written by Grandin and published in MEAT+POULTRY about the new auditing system using an objective scoring system. He was intrigued by the guidelines and scoring approach and saw it as an opportunity to address a problem with cattle stunning that was discovered at his plant by a European customer. At the time he didn’t know who Grandin was and with a background in fabrication and focusing on improving the quality of production, he saw this new system as a way to solve a problem in the slaughtering area of the plant, which was not his specialty. But he was intrigued by the audit process and implemented it at his plant. After a few months, prodding, vocalization and slips and falls decreased.


“It improved our scores and it improved our productivity because calm animals and good stunning helped us be more efficient,” Karczewski said. Little did he know, he was responsible for making Taylor the first company to implement Grandin’s system, much to the joy of AMI officials and Grandin. A few months later, Karczewski was part of a panel discussion on animal welfare audits at the first-ever AMI Animal Care and Handling Conference in 1997. Minutes after sharing his experience with the audience, Grandin approached Karczewski wanting to hear more details about the success of the program at Taylor. Grandin and Riley then encouraged and supported him to assume the role of the first chairman of the association’s newly formed Animal Welfare Committee, a position that took his career in a new direction that he said was highlighted by working closely with Grandin for many years.

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McChange

Due in part to pressure from animal activist groups, McDonald’s Corp. hired Grandin in 1999 to train its team of food safety auditors on animal welfare practices using the objective scoring system that was becoming adopted by a growing number of plants. Once training was completed, any plant supplying the burger chain was required to meet or exceed the auditing criteria. Once the auditing system was implemented throughout the McDonald’s system in North America, plants were able to identify and fix problems throughout the McDonald’s network of suppliers.


“When McDonald’s required suppliers to use the audit,” Karczewski said, “that was a world-changing event for the meat industry.”


“In six months, I saw more change than I’ve seen in my whole entire career,” Grandin said.


It didn’t take long for competitors, Wendy’s and Burger King to get on board, following the leader by auditing plants and investing resources in animal welfare.
The buy-in from McDonald’s in 1999 signaled a huge shift for any meat company supplying customers in the QSR segment and beyond.


Erika Voogd was one of the first McDonald’s humane handling officers. Voogd recalled how the plants she was working with when the new animal handling audits began were focused on efficiency and maximizing the number of head processed with little regard for the welfare of the animals.


“This meant that if every cow or pig needed to be electrically prodded to get them to enter a stun box or restrainer, it was common practice,” said Voogd, who has operated Voogd Consulting Inc. in West Chicago since 2003. “Nowadays, it is uncommon for the electric prod to need to be used more than 5% to 10% of the time and many plants have eliminated use almost completely.”


When Grandin’s system was introduced, electric prods could only be used to move pigs or cattle 25% of the time. Efforts to reduce balking, slipping and falling became a priority for suppliers of meat products to the world’s largest QSR chains.


“The plants needed to think smarter and eliminate the slippery floors and distractions that kept animals from moving forward,” Voogd said.


When it came to stunning cattle prior to the new animal welfare auditing system, it was not uncommon for multiple shots to be administered due to an agitated, stressed animal or a poorly maintained captive-bolt stunner.


“This was a typical process; double stunning cattle routinely,” Voogd said.


However, the new guidelines only allowed for a maximum of 5% of double shots when they were introduced in 1999 and then lowered to four out of 100 as of 2018.


“Plants needed to ensure that the stun tool was in excellent condition and strong enough to stun the animal, even as cattle and pigs became heavier and larger over the years. Also, the handling operators needed to develop calm handling methods to assure that the animals were not stressed when presented to the slaughter area for stunning,” Voogd said.


Today it is rare for Voogd to record a double shot during a one-hour audit at the plants she works with throughout North America. She said, at most, it is an occasional occurrence.


“The plants that maintain their equipment, handle their animals calmly and have strong enough stun tools just don’t experience too many issues,” she said.

Erika Voogd (left) was one of McDonald’s first animal welfare officers.

Tools of the trade

Voogd added that technology has played a role in improving animal welfare. Implementing third-party remote video auditing of animal handling practices has been adopted by most of the major meat and poultry companies in the industry.


Stunning technology has also made great strides through the years, including captive-bolt stunners.


“They are stronger in caliber and force and more ergonomically acceptable for the operator. This has made stunning easier and less likely to fail,” Voogd said.


Chuck Bildstein agreed. The humane stunning and equipment specialist with Riverside, Mo.-based Bunzl Processor Division is an authority on the most effective tools to render livestock insensible. He said captive-bolt stunners today are not a one-size-fits-all proposition.


“There are now stunners designed for specific-sized animals,” he said. “Bulls, bison, sows and boars require a more powerful tool for better stunning results.”


Tools to ensure stunners are performing properly are another advancement.


“Stun testers provide plants the opportunity to confirm the stunner equipment is working properly before use. Electronic recordkeeping data collection to track long-term storage and trend information for each stunner is another valuable tool,” Bildstein said.


“The plants are also more aware of the importance of the stunners and how important maintenance and cleaning of the stunner is. The plants have specific SOP documentation on the stunner equipment that provides detail to the maintenance personnel as to the proper steps for maintenance,” he said.


Voogd pointed out that there has been a flurry of large capacity pork plants adopting CO2 stunning. This method allows for group handling and stunning of pigs versus electrically stunning one pig at a time in a single-file chute.


“This technology has dramatically reduced the stress on the individual pig and greatly improved the meat quality,” she said. “Electric prods no longer need to be used and relying on the pig’s natural desire to stay with pen mates helps to assure that they remain calm prior to stunning.”


However, many smaller-volume meat lockers still use electrical wands on pigs to stun them. Improvements in this equipment have also been positive.


“The change in 2010 to head-heart stunning versus head-only stunning greatly improved the likelihood of the pigs remaining insensible until they could be bled,” Voogd said.

The industry standard changed from head-only stunning for pigs to head-heart stunning in 2010.

Keeping solutions simple

For decades, Grandin has preached that most animal welfare problems can be fixed easily and don’t require tens of thousands of dollars in plant renovations, redesigns and makeovers. This was the case at the plants supplying McDonald’s and in most of today’s plants. For example, common issues like slipping and falling animals were fixed by installing non-slip flooring at plants and in loading and unloading areas. Most other issues were resolved by maintaining and repairing facilities as well as training and supervising workers.


At that time, there were 75 plants supplying McDonald’s, recalled Grandin, and only three of them required investments in expensive equipment.


“When it comes to handling and stunning, it’s much better now.” Grandin said.


During the process, it was discovered that one unfortunate reality is that some plants employed livestock handlers who enjoyed hurting and torturing animals.


“It’s not nice to say, but it was something we learned,” Grandin said.


One of the causes of animal welfare problems in the past decade was a flurry of mobility issues in cattle. Causes ranged from the use of feed additives (beta agonists) during warm weather to genetic complications causing leg conformation problems in cattle and hogs.


“A calm person makes a good animal handler,” Grandin said. “Good handling takes a lot of walking due to the need to bringing up small groups of animals at a time.


“Handling is not a flunky job; it’s a really important job.”

Posted on

Technological Evolution

By Kimberlie Clyma

November 2021

Technological
Evolution

Today’s productive, efficient and safe meat processing industry owes its advancements to the pioneers of the past

Meat+Poultry

Reiser

At the turn of the 20th century, meat packing was the largest industry in the United States – it was responsible for $1 billion in annual sales. Today, annual sales total more than $150 billion in meat packing and processing and $65 billion in poultry slaughter and processing.


In the early 1900s, giant slaughterhouses and meat packing plants were found in the Midwestern Heartland in cities such as Chicago, Milwaukee and Kansas City, which were nestled between the many ranches in the Western part of the country and the growing cities sprinkled on the East Coast. Today, meat processing plants are located east to west, north to south, in an industry that employs more than 500,000 people – and more than 2 million people along the supply chain including those who supply the packing and processing industries with ingredients and equipment and the many who work in transportation, retail and foodservice.


The meat processing industry is not only responsible for the growth of meat production and consumption across the country, but it helped to shape several technological advancements used in meat processing and packaging itself and in other production-related industries. It was responsible for the rise of the railroad industry, the labor movement and transportation, not to mention innovations such as industrial refrigeration, the assembly line and vacuum packaging. Tales of the pioneers of these technologies can be found in the storied histories of the industry’s equipment leaders, many of whom are still involved in the meat industry today.

First machines, then processes

Meat packing plants began appearing in the United States in the early 1800s, mostly on the East Coast. But by the mid-1800s growth moved to the Midwest as the Chicago Stockyards became the biggest US livestock market and meat packing plants emerged in other Midwestern cities. As more consumers started demanding meat, meat packers looked to expand and mechanize their operations. Little by little, meat processing equipment started becoming available, making the business of breaking down carcasses and processing the meat more profitable.


The early meat processing equipment pioneers made it possible for meat packers to streamline their operations, increasing production amounts and production speed.
“Many of the early equipment manufacturers worked with the intention of improving not just processes, not just trying to make more money, but they were trying to make things better for people,” said Brent Meyer, owner of Brent Meyer Communication. “They were asking themselves: ‘How do we get food to other places? How can we transport food better? How can we make things safer?’ A huge part of the industry that many people don’t think about, is the idea that they were working to make a system, a process or a product better.”


Historians credit the last couple of decades of the 1800s and first few decades of the 1900s with a number of the primary inventions used in today’s meat processing environments. In the 1880s, mechanical mixers, stuffers and choppers were developed. By the early 1900s, cure pumps, slicing machines and conveyorized tables were invented. And by the 1920s, band saws and meat grinders made meat processing faster and easier.


The father of the modern meat grinder was said to be Karl Friedrich Christian Ludwig Freiherr Drais von Sauerbron from Germany. He invented the manual meat grinder in the mid-1800s. He also invented the typewriter, a stenograph machine and a “wooden running machine” that later evolved into the modern bicycle.
Two women are credited with helping to shape the way meat is cut in processing environments today. First, in 1813, an American Shaker in Massachusetts named Sarah “Tabitha” Babbit invented the circular saw. Bandsaws were later invented and in 1846, Anne Pauline Crepin from France invented a way to weld the ends of the bands securely together, allowing band saws to successfully function.


“Thousands of technological developments, innovations in engineering designs and incremental improvements in food manufacturing equipment and technology have been put into place since the early 1900s,” said David Seckman, president and chief executive officer of the Food Processing Suppliers Association, which represents the suppliers to the food processing and packaging industry. “Today’s food processing and packaging is radically different than that of 100 years ago.”


Cozzini Bros. started out as a one-man knife sharpening business on the streets of Chicago and evolved into a 4th generation family blade business (now called PRIMEdge). After years of simply sharpening blades for butcher shops and restaurants, Cozzini Bros. took the next step into the processing world, sharpening bowl choppers, grinding plates and slicing blades. Their quest for more efficiency and consistency, led them to create shelf-sharpening blades for continuous production bowl choppers using pumps and pressure. One thing led to another, and the company started producing blending, conveying and pumping systems before selling to Middleby in 2010. Now they’ve gone full circle and their current company, PRIMEdge, is back in the blade business.


“Suppliers like us had a lot of opportunities to evolve through the years,” said Ivo Cozzini, CEO of PRIMEdge. “We had opportunities to really think things through, to become more automated, safer, and make better pieces of equipment. The more you could evolve, the more successful you could be.”

Packaging meat used to be a very labor intensive job. Each piece of meat was placed into a bag, vacuum sealed, clipped and then moved on.
Packaging meat used to be a very labor intensive job. Each piece of meat was placed into a bag, vacuum sealed, clipped and then moved on. Sealed Air / CRYOVAC brand

Moving down the line

Early signs of automation can be traced back to the late 1800s when meat packing facilities started to use an assembly line system to move product through the operation. In the 1870s, in plants in Chicago and Cincinnati, slaughterhouses used monorail trolleys to move the carcasses past the line of workers, each of whom performed a specific task. This is often historically referred to as a “dis-assembly” line.


The process of different workers performing singular tasks was later adopted by other industries, but not truly recognized for its efficiencies until Henry Ford designed an assembly line in 1913 to manufacture his Model T cars. He credited the meat packing “dis-assembly” lines with giving him the idea. Thanks to this highly efficient process (which cut the time it took to assemble a car from 12 ½ hours to 93 minutes), Ford was able to drastically reduce the price of its automobiles.


“Many initial advancements were focused on providing faster machines that could handle more capacity, but as the technology improved so did innovation,” said Wayne Bryant, senior vice president of sales for Reiser USA, which was founded in 1959 as the service and sales agent of Germany-based Vemag. “For example, electronic advancements led to more precise machines that provided better, more consistent portions and limited re-works and waste. Improvements in packaging resulted in more attractive solutions that provided better food safety and longer shelf life while using more sustainable materials. The one thing driving all this change and innovation has been processor need.


“The need for increased automation has driven technological advancement in the equipment industry for decades. Processors have always looked for solutions that can provide more capacity, faster throughput, and more efficiencies. Throughout history they have wanted solutions that enable them to be more precise, more productive, and more profitable, and that continues today,” Bryant said.

Wrap it up

As a part of this year’s Pack Expo show in Las Vegas, PMMI – The Association for Packaging and Processing Technologies, put together an exhibit called Pack to the Future, which featured 25 historic machines, more than 230 photos, 250 packaging facts and a lineup of speakers. Jack Aguero, president of Aguero Associates, and Meyer were co-curators for the event. During the 18-month long process of procuring equipment, photos and facts about the history of packaging, the two learned a lot about the evolution of the industry and its impact on society as a whole, as well as on its influence on the meat industry.


Packaging can trace its roots back for centuries. Pottery was an early form of packaging, as was paper, glass, metal and later plastics. Each material has its own history and evolution through the years and variations in uses, especially when it came to food.


“As civilizations developed, goods needed to be packaged for transport. Packaging grew in sync with the ideas of commerce and trade,” Meyer said. “Historically, you can see how packaging has really impacted and benefited mankind. Many of the things that we have today are because of how packaging has evolved. Culture wouldn’t have developed the way it has throughout history if we didn’t have packaging.”


Some packaging developments were out of necessity, while others occurred almost by accident. In 1809, General Napoleon Bonaparte offered 12,000 francs to anyone who could find a way to preserve food for his troops. Nicholas Appert, a Parisian chef, discovered how food sealed in glass containers and then boiled would help food stay fresh for long periods. But glass wasn’t ideal for transporting to the troops, so soon after Peter Durand of Britain received a patent for inventing the tin can.


“The Industrial Revolution is really where modern packaging began,” Aguero said. “1795 to 1850 was the very beginning of modern packaging. Then from 1850 to 1900, the first packaging machines started to enter the market. Between 1900 and 1950, packaging machinery became a powerful industry.”


Did what was going on in society effect the development of different types of packaging or did new packaging help to change the culture? Arguments can be made for both. “Packaging and society have a very symbiotic relationship,” Meyer said. “Changes in society have helped to drive packaging and then packaging also makes changes in society.”


Seckman explained further, “Back in the early 1900s, preparing food for the nightly family dinner was labor intensive and normally took hours to prepare. There were very few processed foods to provide ready-to-cook options. Then, times changed. In the early 1920s, processed foods were beginning to be introduced into stores. World War I brought a new innovation – canned foods – which were created for our troops. After the war, gas stoves, newer kitchen appliances and refrigeration allowed families to purchase, store and prepare food more easily. And, in the 1930s, more ready-to-eat foods hit the market.


“With each passing decade, the food industry has evolved and the manufacturers of food processing and packaging equipment have continued to work with processors on a consistent basis in order to meet, address and further improve upon the technology needs of the industry.”

The ‘Kleenex’ of packaging

“The world interacts with packaging, and the world, in some ways drives packaging,” Aguero said. “There’s always somebody in the packaging industry who is going to try to invent a better way to do something.”


Enter, Cryovac.


In 1941, the Cryovac brand was born, and later that brand would be synonymous with meat packaging. The trademark was filed by the Dewey and Almy Company, which later became the W.R. Grace Co. In 1998, the Cryovac brand and technology was purchased by Sealed Air. Many meat plants to this day call their packaging room, the “Cryovac room.”


“When you think about some products you automatically think about certain iconic brands, like Kleenex and Jell-O and Band-Aid. I would put our brand Cryovac right there with them,” said Shawn Harris, executive director of marketing for Sealed Air’s Food Protein Platform. “Cryovac has become synonymous with vacuum packaging, and there’s a great sense of pride with that.”


In 1946, Cryovac began testing monomer bags as the first Cryovac Barrier Bag utilizing a snorkel vacuum that was sealed with a metal clip. The first equipment produced was the 8200 model that vacuumed and clipped the co-extruded barrier material.


“The piece of meat would come down the conveyor, the employee would grab it, put it on the hose, suck the air out of it, clip it and put it back on the conveyor before the next one came down,” Harris said. “It was very labor intensive.”


In 1975, Cryovac introduced the 8300 series of Rotary Chamber Vacuum Machines. This machine enabled increased throughput with its rotary design (often referred to as the “octopus”) and eliminated the clip by using heat seal bars that were water cooled.


“This was the machine that enabled the beef industry to transform,” Harris said. “Now carcass beef could be cut and primals could be marketed across the country.”

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Association connection

  • One of the earliest associations that can be linked to today’s North American Meat Institute (NAMI) was the American Meat Packers Association, which formed in 1906.
  • The Food Processing Suppliers Association (FPSA) can trace its roots back to the Association of Ice Cream Supply Men in 1911.
  • In 1922, the Association of Ice Cream Supply Men and National Association of Ice Cream Manufacturers held their first trade show in Cleveland, a precursor to today’s Process Expo.
  • The Packaging Machinery Manufacturers Institute was formed in 1933.
  • In 1956, the first PMMI Packaging Machinery Show was held.

Thinking out of the box

After decades of selling beef in carcass form (fore and hind quarters), packers began to further process wholesale cuts of beef and vacuum package them in smaller, sub-primal portions. It allowed for shipping cost savings and took advantage of the increasing demands by supermarkets for specific cuts of meat. This “boxed beef” idea was developed by a beef packer founded in 1960 in Denison, Iowa, called Iowa Beef Processors (later known as IBP, and purchased by Tyson Foods in 2001).


“We would still be marketing beef swinging on hooks without this technology. But now a retailer didn’t have to buy a whole side of beef and hope they could sell it all. They could buy what they needed for their market and just sell that,” Harris said. “Boxed beef really was one single thing that changed the value of the whole chain. It took so much waste out of the system.”


The pork industry continued to wrap its products in paper until the 1980s.


While IBP is credited with developing the idea for boxed beef, Cryovac’s rotary chamber vacuum packaging machine gave the packers the tools and technology to make it happen.


In a 2001 interview with Livestock Weekly, Robert Peterson, former IBP chairman of the board and CEO, said, “The company that really made boxed beef possible was Cryovac.”


“It’s powerful when someone that’s one of your largest customers and a pioneer in the industry says, ‘This would not get done without Cryovac,’” Harris said. “These are the things that change industries.”


Vacuum packaging is still readily used today, as equipment suppliers continue to advance the technology. Modified atmosphere packaging (MAP) technology, developed in 1979, differs from vacuum packaging in that it doesn’t necessarily remove oxygen from the packaging, it just adjusts the oxygen and CO2 levels in the package. Both provide added shelf life and allow processors to expand product offerings and distribution, efficiently and safely.


“From vacuum packaging to modified atmosphere packing and now high-pressure processing, the evolution of packaging continues,” said Jorge Izquierdo, vice president of Market Development for PMMI. “The demand for convenience keeps growing, so new technologies will continue to be developed to meet those demands.”

The perfect patty

Sometimes it’s the little things that make a big impact on history. When it comes to the origin of the hamburger, there are some disputes as to where and when the popular Hamburger Steak was first put between two pieces of bread and turned into the popular hand-held dish so many people enjoy today – most historians say it was between 1885 and 1904.


Some say it happened at the Erie County Fair in 1885, others say a Texas cook named Fletcher Davis was the first to serve hamburger steak between two pieces of Texas toast. And, then there’s Billy Ingram, founder of White Castle who launched his business in 1921 selling small, square hamburger “sliders” by the sack full.


When it comes to the mass production of hamburger patties, another name is found in the history books – Harry H. Holly.


Holly had been working as a structural iron worker when the Depression hit in the late 20s. After losing his job and struggling to find another, he and his wife opened a hamburger shop under the back stairs of his grandmother’s home in Calumet City, Ill. Despite the challenging times, his business grew.


However, he soon realized that molding the burgers by hand took too much time and didn’t allow for any consistency in the size and shape of the patties he was making. In 1937, Holly built a wooden squeeze press using the rim of a dinner plate as a form and molded the patties by pulling a lever. After tweaking his prototype a few times, he patented the machine.


He then sold his hamburger business and started building steel versions of his patty forming machine and Hollymatic Corp. was born. The company celebrated its 80th anniversary in 2017.


Today, Hollymatic and its sister companies Rollstock, NuTEC Manufacturing, Former and Patty Paper, create machines for every part of the meat processing line.
“All of those processes of processing the product are what we’ve built on from that initial springboard of a patty machine from Harry Holly – up and down the processing line,” said Sam Pantano, vice president of national accounts for Hollymatic. “We take it from cut it, grind it, form to process it and package it – we do it all.”

Posted on

Playin’ it Safe

By Bob Sims

July 2021

Playin' it
Safe

Legislation, science and culture have all been variables in the evolution of food and worker safety.

Meat+Poultry

Library of Congress Public Domain

In 1905, an event outside the meat processing industry forever changed its trajectory. That year marked the first publication of Upton Sinclair’s now classic novel, “The Jungle.” The work of fiction depicted the unsavory conditions of the meat packing industry in the United States. Sinclair spent seven weeks working in the packing houses of Chicago to gather experiences for the book. Those experiences gave the author the details necessary to write a book that brought change to an entire industry through legislation, specifically the passing of the Meat Inspection Act of 1906.


This event and others marked monumental shifts throughout the evolution of food safety in the meat packing industry. They set successive changes in motion and pushed food safety and consumer well-being to the top of the priority list for meat processors in the United States.

Early Acts

President Theodore Roosevelt read “The Jungle” and sent labor commissioner Charles P. Neill and social worker James Bronson Reynolds to Chicago, and through their Neill-Reynolds Report, the two confirmed the details of Sinclair’s descriptions of the meat packing houses in his book. Congress then passed the legislation and President Roosevelt signed the Meat Inspection Act of 1906 into law. While “The Jungle” highlighted worker safety, it essentially created the impetus for food safety, as well.


The Meat Inspection Act of 1906 reformed the meat packing industry in the United States and set standards for sanitation and safe food for human consumption throughout the industry. It established a statute that prohibited the sale of misbranded and adulterated livestock, and the food products derived from that livestock, and ensured slaughter and processing occurred under sanitary conditions. Also, the law mandated the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) inspect all cattle, swine, sheep, goats and horses processed for human consumption before and after slaughter.


“As far as legislation goes, the meat act has not been opened since 1906, so we’re working off the same legislation,” said Casey Gallimore, director of regulatory and scientific affairs at the North American Meat Institute (NAMI). “The only change that’s happened since then is poultry got added in with The Poultry Products Inspection Act [1957] and then you have the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act. But the actual ‘nuts and bolts’ that we work off of at the Meat Institute is the same act from 1906.”


The Humane Methods of Slaughter Act in 1958 addressed the suffering of animals during slaughter and not food safety, but The Poultry Products Inspection Act of 1957 applied the principles of The Meat Inspection Act of 1906 to poultry and poultry products, requiring federal inspection and prohibiting misbranding and adulteration. Another act did pass in 1967, filling in a few other gaps in the 1906 act.


The Wholesome Meat Act of 1967 added consumer protection to the 1906 act by addressing conditions not covered in the original law. Animals slaughtered for intrastate commerce did not fall under the federal inspection regulations of the 1906 law and were the responsibility of the state. Limited state funds opened the door for abuses and inadequate food safety. The 1906 law also left out imported products and rendering.


The new act in 1967 amended the 1906 act adding the regulation of transporters, renderers and cold-storage warehouses to the USDA’s authority, as well as requiring much stricter requirements on imported meat products. In addition, the new act extended the USDA’s jurisdiction over slaughter and processing for intrastate commerce and only allowed uninspected meat to go to the owner of a slaughtered animal.


As regulations, laws, government oversight and an understanding of the need to push food safety forward in light of significant events evolved, so too did the processes of ensuring food safety regarding all the periphery of the meat business.

Today, food safety and worker safety are both rooted in science and risk assessment.

Continued Evolution

As with all industry today, technology and the automation and machines that result from it continue to change manufacturing at a rapid pace. This change includes the meat and poultry industry, but meat and poultry processing maintains some uniqueness relative to most other manufacturing industries. People still provide much of the labor in processing.


“If you think about vehicle manufacturing or even a lot of food manufacturing, they can be done primarily with machines where employees are highlighting the machines,” Gallimore said. “Wherein our industry the predominant part of processing happens from employees, and machines highlight employees and help employees. It’s very different.”


Meat and poultry processing necessitates human labor due to the impossibility of every cow, hog, chicken, etc., to match an exact specification, size and weight needed for machines to adapt to the unavoidable variances. So many unique variables create an intricacy requiring human abilities. The reliance on, and need for, human skill and labor to carry out processing tasks has shaped the way the industry inspects for food safety, but that is changing.


“For a long time, the industry’s only ways of inspecting to see if things were good were just looking at it, smelling it and touching it,” Gallimore said. “Now, the environmental and product microbial sampling programs at these facilities are intense. They have all kinds of different things they’re testing for on very intricate schedules between areas of the plant or different types of products, different organisms that they’re looking at whether it’s pathogens or indicator organisms, so inspections are more based on what you can’t see and what really is causing illness.”


As inspection evolved and became better and more comprehensive due to science and academia, so did food safety. Industry began to realize when all companies provided safer food, the industry benefited. Because of that premise, over time a shift occurred and the processing industry began sharing information on food safety. Suppliers to the industry began to share information with not only their processor customers, but also with each other. Food safety became noncompetitive.


“At the end of the day, all the customer sees is that there is ground beef being recalled, and then they have a fear of ground beef,” Gallimore said. “So, we realized many years ago that we weren’t served by anyone doing better than anyone else on food safety because all of our products are looked at as very much the same thing.”
KatieRose McCullough, also a director of regulatory and scientific affairs at NAMI, related the same sentiment to worker safety in meat and poultry processing.


“[The meat and poultry] industry did the same thing with worker safety as well,” McCullough said. “It said, ‘this isn’t a competitive issue.’ In the spirit that all our employees are valuable because human life is valuable, and how do we best protect our workers in a noncompetitive space? We did a very, very similar thing when it came to worker safety as well.”


A direct relationship exists between food safety and worker safety. While USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), established in 1977 as the Food Safety and Quality Service (FSQS) and reorganized and renamed in 1981, oversees meat and poultry food safety and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), founded in 1971 after the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 monitors worker safety, one always affects the other in the meat processing industry.


As the people pointing out the things employees might or might not be doing to ensure safety, personnel often share close relationships in meat packing plants.


“The other thing is that they’re both rooted in science and risk assessment,” Gallimore said. “So, you make decisions in food safety and worker safety based on data and risk assessment. That again is another reason why those two types of people in plants tend to have really close working relationships and really play off each other well.”

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Modern Perspective

Legislation, science and academia eventually came together after an event in 1993 took food safety to a next level. An E. coli outbreak at San Diego-based Jack in the Box restaurants sickened more than 700, hospitalized 144 and killed four. This event prompted legislation mandating Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) plans in 1996. Russell Cross, professor of Animal Science at Texas A&M University, and an original advocate for mandating HACCP in meat processing, said the regulations also applied to all state-inspected facilities as well as federally inspected facilities.


“And really when the United States mandated HACCP in 1996, they were effectively mandating HACCP for a good part of the world,” he added. “Because anything that’s imported into this country has to have a meat inspection system that’s equal to the US system. That impacted a lot of the countries around the world.”


In addition to all the legislation generated from “The Jungle” to government mandated HACCP plans, another and more slowly moving event shaped the evolution of food safety and continues to further it.


According to Frank Yiannas, Food and Drug Administration (FDA) deputy commissioner for food policy and response, while legislators responded to events that placed food safety issues in the public eye, and the food industry worked to make food safer, the food production and foodservice communities began to recognize the advancement of food safety needed more than just rules, testing, inspections and training. There needed to be a shift in the way people think.


“It requires a better understanding of human behavior and concepts of organizational culture,” Yiannas said. “In fact, you can have the best rules, policies and procedures written on paper, but if they’re not put into practice by people, they’re useless. But, widespread realization of that reality has been a long time coming.”


He added, “Increased interest in food safety culture has coincided with advances over the past 50 years in behavioral and social science research that have produced valuable insights into people’s thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors. So, you see, advances in understanding the technology of keeping foods safe and understanding the behaviors needed to keep foods safe have been advancing on parallel tracks.”


Company leaders must define food safety as an intrinsic value of the company, a non-negotiable thread of the fabric sewn into organizational culture. It is not a priority, but instead a guiding principle to how those in the food industry conduct business.


“Food manufacturers need to recognize that a food safety culture is not a communication plan, a tagline or a slogan,” Yiannas said.


Everyone from the C-suite to managers on the processing floor must make sure expectations concerning food safety are clear and communicate those expectations, as well as ensure all the knowledge and skills are in place to produce safe food. Investments in the design, or renovation of facilities, tooling and equipment selection and replacement and having experts on staff all play crucial roles in the production of safe food.


“It also includes managing food safety metrics and utilizing positive and negative reinforcement,” Yiannas said. “And it involves having knowledge of and leveraging proven behavioral science principles in your journey to strengthen a culture of food safety. Creating a food safety culture involves leveraging both food science and behavioral science.

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Leaving Legacies

By Joel Crews

April 2021

Leaving
Legacies

Looking back at a century of icons, innovations and industry giants

Meat+Poultry

Denver Post/Contributor via Getty Images

Sosland Publishing Company’s coverage of the food industry started out focusing on the grain, flour milling and baking industries for the first 50 years after its founding in 1922. During that same era, the meat-processing industry began a government-mandated transition away from being dominated by a handful of companies that developed an integrated infrastructure that made it almost impossible for outside cattle producers, feedlot operators, livestock transporters or processors to survive unless they were part of what was then, an insurmountable machine. There has always been an important link between the grain industries and commercial livestock production as feed quality and availability determines price, which is passed on to meat processors and the quality, availability and price they could demand for products on the market. A century ago, and still today, the constant has been the meat and poultry processing system’s reliance on grain-based feed to finish and sustain the herds and flocks needed to produce food for a dynamic, growing and migrating population. What has changed and continues evolving are the names in the game today versus 100 years ago.


Few if any of the pioneering companies, brands or descendants of the industry’s legendary leaders of 100 years ago are relevant or involved in today’s industry, evidence of the constant evolution and change that has made meat and poultry processing’s history a long and winding road dotted with plenty of peaks and valleys. Volatility has been a constant challenge for the meat processing industry as it has been for all segments of the food supply chain. Factors ranging from weather to labor issues to regulatory compliance to economic instability to international relations can have profound impacts on the degree of business success or failure any segment might experience.


Since Sosland’s founding, the company has expanded its portfolio of publications and websites to include a wider swath of food and beverage industries, including commercial and retail baking, global grain, meat and poultry, pet food, dairy and the supermarket perimeter. Looking closer at some of the names and companies that were prominent in the meat industry from a century ago sheds light on how the pieces complete the puzzle that is today’s industry.

Gimme’ Five

When considering the iconic meat companies and legendary leaders of a century ago, most historians would agree the five most famous names would include Philip Armour (Armour and Co.), Gustavus Swift (Swift & Co.), Thomas Wilson (Wilson & Co.) Edward Morris (Morris & Co.) and Patrick Cudahy (Cudahy Packing Co.).


Maureen Ogle literally wrote the book on the history of the meat industry. Her book, “In Meat We Trust,” published in 2013, documented how the dominating influence of these and other companies and icons for much of the late 19th century was all but snuffed out in the early 1920s. It was then that a US Federal Trade Commission investigation concluded that the vast majority of all livestock was slaughtered by one of the “Big Five” firms. The companies’ stakeholders were forced to surrender the control they previously had over the transportation infrastructure they relied on to achieve domination of the meat industry for decades by agreeing to sign the FTC’s Meat Packers Consent Decree of 1920. This muted the integrated system of stockyards (established in Chicago initially and later in Kansas City, Texas and westward); cold storage facilities; and the vast network of strategically routed railroads serving the country’s population centers the companies had relied on for many years of success. The decree was a result of an antitrust investigation ordered by then-President Woodrow Wilson. Congress went on with the passage of the Packers and Stockyards Act of 1921, to prevent consolidation and avert the threat posed by a meat monopoly. That power of consolidation was epitomized in the early 1900s by the “Beef Trust,” also known as the National Packing Co. that was formed in 1902 by Armour, Morris and Swift and was broken up about 10 years later. During its reign, the Beef Trust gobbled up scores of stockyards and slaughtering plants in the United States and grew its fleet of refrigerated railcars to thousands in route to controlling the lion’s share of US meat production.


When asked how the “Big Five” forged the path for future meat companies and laid the groundwork for today’s dominant companies and industry leaders, Ogle’s answer is simple.


“They didn’t,” she said.


That was because the consent decree and the Packers and Stockyards Act reshuffled the deck.


“Federal oversight was added to both the stockyard operations and the packing operations,” Ogle said. “All of those old companies really took a serious beating because in effect they had to dismantle a huge part of their corporate infrastructure and kind of start over again.”


The situation was made more challenging because World War I
had just ended and the United States was reeling from almost a half-decade of turmoil resulting from a boomeranging transition from peacetime to war and then back to a focus on domestic civilian life, all between 1914 and 1918.

www.maureenogle.com
Kenneth Monfort led one of the first companies to use a new business model to feed, and ultimately, process cattle, eliminating the need for feedlots that were a hallmark of the industry’s previous era.

New Blood

One post-war casualty that resulted was a collapse of agriculture as demand for grain diminished along with Americans’ appetite for beef. The 1920s was also the decade when refrigerated trucks challenged railroad shippers as a means for transporting meat to the growing population bases of the United States. This opened doors of opportunities for many smaller meat companies to break into the meat trade without being hamstrung by the new regulations facing the former industry behemoths.

Additionally, the new packers in the industry also held an advantage over the old guard because they were not bound by labor unions or old ideas that hindered the previous regime. Newcomers to the processing industry boldly forged completely different relationships with cattle feeders and ranchers who would sell directly to them and not be dependent on stockyards.


“Those big packers never again had the lock hold that they once did,” Ogle said. “So, for them, everything was scrambled and by the 1940s, what kept them going was really just the sheer demand (for meat) of another war,” thanks in part to canned meat being used to feed US troops overseas.


But after World War II, a new generation of investors and pioneers, like Warren Monfort and his son Kenneth, created a new model of feeding commercial cattle on a large scale for packers, who would contract directly with Monfort’s company and challenge the Corn Belt in/out feeders. For years, those feeders thrived by specializing in producing grains and when corn prices were low, purchasing and finishing range cattle with corn-heavy diets, cashing in on beef when it was worth more than corn. Monfort’s approach took the seasonality out of feeding and eliminated stockyards from the equation, which hit the Corn Belt hard.


“The stockyards just kind of fell to pieces in the 30s and 40s because there just wasn’t a place for them anymore in the system,” Ogle said.

A handful of companies, including Swift & Co., dominated the meat industry until the early 1920s.

Feeding Frenzy

Kenneth Monfort would grow his operations to eventually include processing facilities for lamb and beef as well as adding a distribution and transportation company. Monfort was also a pioneer in the industry for first introducing the concept of shipping boxed beef to customers, another departure from the previous era of meat processing. Monfort Beef ultimately became publicly traded and was renamed Monfort of Colorado Inc. ConAgra would go on to acquire Monfort in 1987.


In the post-WWI period feeding operations, like Monfort’s and others, the packing operators were doing business directly with each other, eliminating the once crucial role of the stockyards. Reliance on the railroads was replaced by trucking, which was unregulated for shipping of agricultural products at the time. The former heavyweights that once ruled the industry, no longer were factors and even asked to have the consent decree lifted because they could no longer compete in the new business.


“All of this had a big impact on the Corn Belt and the way people raised livestock and how they calculated the value of grain,” Ogle said.


Most of the legacy companies went through numerous ownership changes in hopes of finding their way back in the industry like the good ol’ days, to no avail.


“They were these big entities that were built for another time and place,” Ogle said. “They were really out of date especially because they had built so much of their infrastructure around railroads and stockyards and by the 1950s, they were just begging to be released from this consent decree.”


Some of the former giants, like Swift and Armour, attempted to survive other ways, including becoming poultry feeders when the broiler industry became a growing segment.

Inside the Box

After the 1950s, newcomers to the meat and poultry processing industry benefitted from the extinction of the top-heavy structure and big names that dominated 40 years earlier. They were not limited by the consent decree and didn’t have to operate under the scrutiny of labor unions, which wielded significant influence in meat plants starting as early as the 1880s and for most of the next 30 years. Add to the equation that well after World War II and especially starting in the 1950s, the US Department of Agriculture was charged with the mission of pushing beef production as much as possible, peaking when cattle production topped 132 million head in 1975. US per-capita consumption of beef would peak the following year.


One example of the next era of meat industry giants was Iowa Beef Processors (IBP), which was founded in 1960 by Andy Anderson, a pork processor, and Currier Holman, a cattle buyer. The duo opened a beef plant in Denison, Iowa, in 1961, with a modest operation that processed about 800 cattle per day. Their philosophy of building plants in rural areas where livestock already were being produced was an attempt at making the system more efficient by cutting transportation costs, securing cheaper, initially non-union labor and processing carcasses into smaller cuts, making boxed beef its focus.


With an industry background working in California and Idaho during the ‘20s and ‘30s, Anderson established IBP using a new and different lens, which didn’t include accommodating labor unions. That first plant was evidence of the new approach and was based on a single-story facility design to be as simple as possible and use as little physical labor as possible without union oversight. Like Monfort, IBP purchased livestock directly from feeders, pushing feedlots further into obsoletism.


“There was no way he was going to build according to the old model,” Ogle said. “He wanted to do exactly the opposite of the old model because that’s the kind of business he’d grown up in, on the West Coast. And so, Denison, Iowa, got this very state of the art and very different kind of operation than Armour and Swift had started.”


IBP’s model of building new-school, non-union processing plants and utilizing an unregulated trucking industry to ship its fresh products paved the way for others.
“Anybody who was a new packer by then, was trying to build a plant that didn’t involve union labor,” Ogle said. “It didn’t mean the union wasn’t going to show up and try to organize the workers, but the unions just didn’t play a part in the mindset of anybody who was thinking about opening a packing plant from say 1930 on, whereas Swift and Armour and Wilson were just stuck with them; they couldn’t get rid of them.”


After several rounds of corporate reorganizations, ownership changes and numerous lawsuits brought by the old guard, they were finally allowed to run some operations without union labor by the 1970s. By then, Swift had built a new beef plant in Grand Island, Neb., that started up in 1965 while investment companies were buying up the fledgling remaining properties of Swift, Armour and Wilson and terminating union contracts as part of many of those deals through the 1970s.


“And of course, by then, they’re still saddled with all those old facilities,” Ogle said, many of which were multi-level operations that were labor intensive and lacking efficiency.


With Anderson’s sole focus on operating packing plants, companies like Swift and Armour were forced to diversify and shift ownership with strategies focusing on a variety of foods, which put them at a disadvantage.


“I think the industry just kind of started over again,” Ogle said. “The business [by then] was so hyper-efficient by comparison. Many people have criticized current packers because their success was predicated on the idea that there would be no union constraints.”


She said what could be considered the “new era” of packers becoming prominent by the middle of the 20th century were located almost exclusively west of the Mississippi River and proudly operated as mavericks compared to the juggernauts that had dominated the industry before them. Monfort led the charge in that regard.
“Those guys saw themselves as breaking all the rules,” Ogle said. “They understood exactly how different their operations were from Swift and Armour. Monfort was pretty blunt about it.”


Part of the success of the newer generation of packing operations was due in part to the emergence of grocery store chains.


“I cannot overstress how important chain grocery stores were to the packing and feeding industry for livestock in the 20th century,” Ogle said. “Andy Anderson, for example wanted to deal with a big chain store with one central buyer.”


Meanwhile, for most of the new plants that didn’t ship across state lines, food safety wasn’t highly scrutinized by USDA inspectors, who were only required to inspect slaughter operations that were doing interstate shipping of products.

Poultry Minded

While pork and beef were king for most of the second half of the 19th century and the first few decades of the 20th century, poultry processing was steadily emerging as a protein competitor. Jesse Jewell, who was credited with making Gainesville, Ga., the “poultry capital of the world,” was a pioneer in the industry for introducing vertical integration to poultry producers. He joined his family’s feed business in 1922 and in 1930 he took the helm, just in time for the Great Depression. Jewell pivoted by supplying economically challenged producer-customers with chicks and the feed needed to raise them at his expense. After the birds were grown to market weight, he bought them back at a price that reflected his feed costs plus a predetermined profit for the effort of those early contract growers.


His family business, J.D. Jewell Inc., expanded its integration efforts in the late 1930s with the addition of a hatchery in 1940 and a processing plant the following year, just in time to reap the benefits from demand spikes related to World War II. Jewell then added a company-owned feed mill and rendering facility in 1954, completing its vertical integration, which served as a business model for future poultry companies. The company, which was known as the world’s largest integrated chicken producer of its time, was recognized for its signature frozen chicken and for being one of the region’s first employers to hire Black workers to staff its plants. Like its red-meat counterparts, J.D. Jewell resisted efforts of the unions to represent its workers in the early 1950s and violent protests to the unions squashed the organization effort. Jesse Jewell was an active poultry industry leader throughout the 1950s and sold the company to an investment group in the early ‘60s.


Ogle said Jewell learned quickly that the road to profitability in the poultry business was not in selling whole birds, but instead selling chicken meat as a value-added item and an ingredient in products such as frozen pot pies.


“Poultry was more of a processed food from the beginning,” she said.


Ogle said chicken, beef and pork peacefully coexisted in the 1950s and ‘60s, largely because steak and pork were abundant and especially after the war, when steak was no longer an aspiration for consumers and became affordable for the masses. In fact, poultry was for a time, viewed as a loss leader used by chain grocery stores to lure bargain shoppers with low-priced chicken to the meat department, where they would be tempted by higher-priced red meat items. Beef was, indeed, king until the 1970s, when rising prices and new questions about the healthiness of red meat began circulating. Soon, fast-food chains began to take notice and started marketing chicken as a healthier option that happened to be less expensive. Between the peak of 1976, per-capita beef consumption bottomed out for the next four years, dropping from 94 lbs per year to 77 lbs per year, the lowest point in a decade. Chicken’s competition didn’t affect the red meat producers until the late ‘70s and ‘80s when production practices like the use of hormones and antibiotics were called into question and consumers looked to poultry as a more wholesome alternative. It was just another in a series of challenges the meat industry has negotiated.


“The beef industry in particular has had kind of a tortured history,” Ogle said.

Turkey processing, like chicken processing, began as a side business for many farmers facing challenging financial times, especially in the 1930s.
Rosemary Mucklow

Leaders with legacies

Some longtime industry leaders from decades past recalled some of the shifting tides in the meat industry. Rosemary Mucklow, the 88-year-old director emeritus of the North American Meat Institute (NAMI), spent most of the second half of the 20th century leading industry trade organizations and lobbying for its stakeholders. When the industry began to make the transition to boxed beef after its introduction in the 1960s, Mucklow recalled the symbolic significance of Miller Packing Co., then based in Oakland, Calif., removing its rail system used to move carcasses. She estimated it was in the 1980s when its owner, Frank deBenedetti realized meat shipments would soon be exclusively made via vacuum-packed primal cuts, making carcass deliveries obsolete. She credits deBenedetti for his vision.


“He took the rails out of Miller Packing before other people were recognizing the change [to vacuum packaging] was coming,” she said.


Mucklow also said the company that pioneered vacuum-packaging technology, Cryovac, the food packaging division of Sealed Air, deserved more credit for the shift to boxed beef.


“Because of Cryovac, we were able to ship vacuum-packaged meat, which has a longer shelf life, and that development drove enormous change in this industry,” Mucklow said.


Barry Carpenter, the retired chief executive officer and president of NAMI who also served as Deputy Secretary of the US Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Marketing Service, dedicated his 45-plus year career to agriculture.


In the early 1970s, Carpenter supervised meat graders in the Northeast, for processors in Boston, New York and Philadelphia, where railcars and trucks delivered “swinging beef.” However, when boxed beef became the norm in the early ‘80s, graders were cut drastically.


“The whole industry changed,” Carpenter said. “They no longer could come close to competing,” as more cattle were sent to big processing plants. “Since the early ‘80s, I think the percentage of the ‘big four’ was somewhere in the high 70s and it’s probably still there right now, it really hasn’t changed,” he said.

Barry Carpenter