CarVe: A Cornerstone of Cargill’s AI Aspirations
Key Takeaways
- Cargill's CarVe system has increased meat yield per animal by 0.5%, preventing residual meat from being processed into lower-value products.
- Real-time adjustments speed up performance improvements, saving time and lowering costs compared to traditional post-shift analysis.
- Expansion plans include applying CarVe to other fabrication tables and exploring its use in food safety, foreign object detection and animal welfare.
The potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to revolutionize food and beverage operations has done nothing but grow in the past couple years, and many companies have not been stuck in “window shopping” mode for AI technology.
Nevertheless, it takes a certain level of trailblazing and risk tolerance to try out any novel technology. And although several companies have worked AI into their operations, Cargill’s North American beef business recently made mainstream media headlines when it unveiled its proprietary and self-developed CarVe system, which uses cameras and AI technology to monitor meat-cutting operations in fabrication and offer real-time feedback on performance.
In our May issue, we discussed the data used to create the building blocks of CarVe (and its employee attendance forecasting tools) with Abhishek Roy, senior director of global R&D-digital and AI, for Cargill. This month, we dig into the CarVe technology and how much potential the company believes it holds.
CarVe already has won numerous business innovation and AI-related awards, and it has allowed the company to increase its meat yield per animal by 0.5% on average by catching small specks of meat left on bones in real-time and signaling the need for better technique by the meat cutter at the tables.
Without CarVe, that residual meat on the bone would have continued on to a lower-value outcome such as being processed into pet food or even entering the waste stream. The value creation, says Leon Fletcher, vice president of beef operations, has been undeniably positive in multiple areas.
“How can we improve our yield, bring better value to the supply chain, help reduce costs with inflationary impacts across the globe and have a long-term sustainment path that can help train our team knowing that we’ll always have some turnover over time?” he asks. “The great thing about CarVe is that it can hit so many facets around sustainability, value creation and training.”
Digging into CarVe
Cargill rolled CarVe out last year, and it has been such a gamechanger that a major financial publication wrote about it this March, touting the yield improvements wrapped in the mainstream newsworthiness of sustainability and beef price relief. Cargill uses CarVe at the fabrication tables, where employees break down primals into various steaks, roasts and other subprimals. Cargill posted a video on its YouTube channel featuring Fletcher explaining CarVe and showing a few shots of the system in action.
Not only does CarVe improve meat yield, but its real-time results speed up performance adjustments. In traditional cutting operations, employees make their cuts, sending the meat one way and the bones and inedible material into boxes for yield analysis after the shift. Any adjustments to improve performance would need to be communicated to the employees the next day. CarVe changes that timeline significantly.
“Traditionally, you don’t really know if you’re winning on yield performance until the next day, and time is money,” Fletcher notes. “CarVe lets us make micro adjustments in real time, versus waiting 8 or 16 hours to the next shift or next day, those course corrections alone create value, improving our yields and improving the cost of goods.”
As of presstime, CarVe was being used at the chuck tables at Cargill meat plants in Friona, Texas, Fort Morgan, Colo., Dodge City, Kan., and High River, Alberta (Canada), with plans to roll it into Guelph Dunlop in Ontario, Canada, next. Fletcher says Cargill has been ready to run with the technology, but the hurdle has been the supply of AI servers available in the marketplace to keep up with growing demand across all industries.
“We’ve had to start working ahead of the server infrastructure because we couldn’t get them quickly enough,” he says. “AI servers have been the bottleneck, since everyone’s doing something with AI nowadays.”
Building upon CarVe’s success
The food and beverage industry faces a well-known conundrum of how to transfer legacy, hands-on knowledge from a large number of longtime, soon-to-retire workers to the new labor pool. Cargill is no different, and CarVe can help.
“We continue to expand CarVe, because it is about sustainment,” Fletcher explains. “We’ve been looking really hard at long-term sustainment, long-term execution at a high level, and taking the human element out of the knowledge, so that you don’t have to be there for 30 years to know how to do X, Y or Z.”
Fletcher relays that unleashing CarVe’s capabilities on other fabrication tables, such as the tenderloin tables, would be the next logical step — and those rollouts would follow a similar “hub and spoke” approach as the company implemented with the chuck tables. While there’s plenty of growth ahead for CarVe on the fab floor, Fletcher and his team are thinking much bigger and more holistically.
CarVe’s capabilities hold much promise for foreign object detection, traceability, inspection, food safety and animal welfare, he says. And even though CarVe isn’t currently being used on the harvest floor, it may be a different story down the road.
Fletcher says the company would like to use CarVe’s capabilities to reduce E. coli risk on the harvest floor by monitoring tasks and ensuring cross-contamination risks were avoided.
“Did the employee follow the process correctly, yes or no? Did they make the right cut; did they sanitize their knife properly before making another cut?” Fletcher explains. “Those are all real-world things that, if we don’t do it right, we risk having a food safety issue, which devalues the product and also drives up cost.”
Furthermore, CarVe could be tasked with overseeing the sanitary dressing of the carcass, he says, also minimizing risk and improving process efficiency up the line.
“If the rice paper isn’t placed over the brisket perfectly, that’s a high contamination risk event that it can alert us to and identify the carcass, so it can be isolated and reconditioned earlier in the process,” he says. The system also has an inspection opportunity as well, in that it could identify foreign objects on the conveyors or tables, for instance.
Along similar lines, CarVe could help with animal welfare observations and training at the feed yards and all through the animal handling process onto the harvest floor. “It’s actually a very simplistic next step,” he adds, because the system would need to analyze whether a procedure was followed or not, rather than determining meat or bone based on infinite shades of color.
“We really believe that those are actually going to be the quicker wins,” he says. “For food safety, I think the sky’s the limit, and it’s a huge part of the opportunity CarVe gives us.”
Lastly, Fletcher points out potential for the system to assist with employee safety, particularly in terms of ergonomics — are employees processing more pieces in an allotted amount of time than they safely should be processing, for example?
All these ideas revolve around maximizing the amount of beef that Cargill sends to its customers and consumers, rather than getting pushed into a lower-value channel or wasted. In an era where the cattle herd is the lowest in decades, every little bit helps.
“Even one ounce [of extra meat yield] is so huge in this industry,” Fletcher concludes. “An ounce adds up so quickly when you’re looking at how many sides of beef [are processed] and carcass weights today. There is a real value to sending that meat for human consumption instead of having it go toward pet food or cooker product.”
About the Author
Andy Hanacek
Senior Editor
Andy Hanacek has covered meat, poultry, bakery and snack foods as a B2B editor for nearly 20 years, and has toured hundreds of processing plants and food companies, sharing stories of innovation and technological advancement throughout the food supply chain. In 2018, he won a Folio:Eddie Award for his unique "From the Editor's Desk" video blogs, and he has brought home additional awards from Folio and ASBPE over the years. In addition, Hanacek led the Meat Industry Hall of Fame for several years and was vice president of communications for We R Food Safety, a food safety software and consulting company.