By Patrick Thomas
In Denison, Iowa, a robot spends eight hours a day slicing apart hog carcasses at a plant owned by Smithfield Foods. It serves a dual purpose: producing more ribs for barbecues and smokers, while helping ease the U.S. meat industry’s long-running labor shortages.
Meatpackers are increasingly looking to robots for help. Smithfield, the largest U.S. pork processor, began rolling out automated rib pullers at its pork plants several years ago, which company officials said helps leave less wasted meat on the bone and relieves workers from some of the industry’s most physically demanding jobs—allowing workers to be reassigned from pulling loins or ribs to food-quality inspection jobs.
Keller Watts, chief business officer for Smithfield, said the company, which has roughly 35,000 employees in the U.S., aims to use automation to help reassign some 500 people a year. “We can repurpose people,” he said. “It’s a key focal point for us.”
Meatpacking jobs can be some of the toughest, bloodiest and most dangerous around, and companies such as Smithfield, Tyson Foods TSN 0.23% and Cargill have long struggled to fully staff slaughterhouses and processing plants. Workers might have to stand for hours a day, often in cold temperatures, repeatedly slicing livestock carcasses on fast-moving processing lines or moving heavy boxes of frozen meat.
Short-staffed plants that aren’t able to process farmers’ livestock can hinder meat companies’ sales and limit their ability to expand. Raising wages or offering signing bonuses to attract plant workers eats into processors’ profitability. Meat companies are collectively spending billions of dollars on automating some of the more-difficult plant roles, which they said can improve staffing and safety while cutting costs.
Meat processors said they don’t see automation replacing workers or leading to layoffs, partly because turnover in plants is already high and the goal is to move workers to more skilled, harder-to-fill roles.
A $300 million, cutting-edge Tyson chicken processing plant that opened in late 2023 in Danville, Va., is designed to maximize efficiency. It can churn out 20% to 30% more chicken nuggets, strips and wings with 250 fewer people compared with an older, similar plant in Arkansas—part of the company’s $1.3 billion plan to automate more of its operations, from processing to packaging.
Tyson’s new Virginia facility has the capacity to produce roughly 4 million pounds of chicken products a week. Bags of nuggets move down the line where bots sort and pack them into boxes, then lift them onto pallets. Warehouse workers, who in other plants might manually pack and stack boxes, instead oversee the software making the machines hum.
Automated conveyors shift the pallets of boxes to the plant’s 120-foot-high freezer room. Andrew Boyles, the local complex manager, said its automated shelving and tracking system lets workers avoid spending more time in the cold than necessary.
The U.S. meat industry, with more than $200 billion in annual sales, is under pressure to run more efficiently. Profit margins across the three major protein segments—chicken, beef and pork—were strained over the past year as operating costs increased, chicken and pork prices fell and cattle herds dwindled.
Tyson, the largest U.S. meat company by sales, lost $648 million in its 2023 fiscal year. Rival JBS, the world’s largest meatpacker, lost nearly $200 million last year. WH Group, the China-based parent of Smithfield, reported a $624 million operating loss for its pork operations in the U.S. and Mexico last year, while generating a $1 billion operating profit in its packaged meats business in the U.S.
Automation has been an industry ambition for some time, especially among processors of chickens—which tend to be smaller, more uniform in size and easier for a machine to handle.
“There are a lot of efficiencies and savings and productivity involved,” said Tyson Chief Executive Donnie King.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, meatpackers invested in automating tasks such as bagging chicken nuggets and taking the hides off cattle carcasses.
In early 2020, packers temporarily closed plants when tens of thousands of workers fell sick with Covid and hundreds died, according to a 2021 congressional report. Meat companies then struggled over the next year to recruit enough workers and to run their plants at full strength.
U.S. meat processors spent about 5% of their capital investments on advanced automation in 2023, which is higher than it has been in the past, according to Boston Consulting Group. Decker Walker, a consultant at the firm, said those investments will likely keep growing.
Robot butchers that can cut a hog carcass in half or carefully slice meat from a chicken breast have their limits in meat plants’ cold and sometimes messy conditions. Fully autonomous processing operations are still a long way off and carcass-scanning computers can’t yet match humans’ ability to disassemble and debone larger cattle and hog bodies that slightly differ in shape and size.
Taking hourly workers off the processing line and training them to work with robots that require more technical skills can be challenging for meat companies and employees, according to industry officials. Tyson said it is working with a local community college near its new Virginia plant to create a pipeline of potential workers.
Cargill, the third-biggest beef processor by production capacity in the U.S., plans to spend upward of $700 million through the next several years to automate parts of its meat and egg business, said Tom Windish, the head of the company’s beef division.
At Cargill’s plant in Dodge City, Kan., a roughly 6,000 head-a-day operation that is one of the country’s largest beef suppliers, the company dispatched a robot cattle driver to help shepherd livestock from the cattle trucks arriving from feedlots across the plains.
The company has installed more computers and X-ray inspection technology throughout its facilities to detect bones and other undesirable materials in products. Elsewhere in the plant, Cargill now operates automated rib-chine saws that cleave off the spine from the carcass, and machine hock-cutters that chop the front off shanks, the part of the leg between the knee and the beef carcass.
Write to Patrick Thomas at patrick.thomas@wsj.com
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Appeared in the April 10, 2024, print edition as 'Robot Butchers Help Short-Staffed Sector'.
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