Even with rising prices and the ever-present threat of highly pathogenic avian influenza, the meat and poultry industry continues to find ways to innovate to meet consumer needs with its products but also to improve its own efficiency and productivity on the operations side. In fact, companies looking to innovate seem to be experiencing a slightly smoother path toward improved operations than they did through much of the post-Covid era.
At the recent International Production & Processing Expo (IPPE) in Atlanta, equipment manufacturers and processors alike were touting the advances they’d been making to adjust to consumer reaction to higher prices for meat and poultry and challenged supplies. Consumers continue to seek out animal protein, they’re just looking for it in different areas, presented in different ways.
Aaron Leach, senior vice president of supply chain and general manager of prepared foods for Wayne-Sanderson Farms, explains that the industry has seen a bit of a pullback in volume and demand in restaurants and foodservice channels, leading to many of those customers experiencing flat to declining sales after a couple years of double-digit growth.
“That increased pressure is pushing people back into retail, but not just retail tray-pack or people going back to the meat case, but drawing people back to the center of the store,” he says. “So now we’re seeing growth again, both in dollars and in unit sales, in frozen retail.”
As a result, Wayne-Sanderson has had to make adjustments to its operations to meet the changing demands of the consumer. Capital investments have been made to create and package products for the retail consumer rather than the foodservice operator.
“If you're going into retail, you're packing for the consumer, so [we’ve invested in] a lot of bagging equipment,” Leach says. “About half of that segment is going to be nuggets for kids, so we’ve been investing heavily in forming capabilities as well.”
The company also has been ramping up its R&D efforts to address the shift toward retail, looking at solving challenges of bringing popular poultry products, such as wings, to home cooks in a convenient way. Leach notes the rise in popularity of wings really began to ramp up at the tail end of 2024, which has been driving a lot of Wayne-Sanderson’s innovation work. From foodservice to retail, chicken wing products hold a lot of opportunity for advancement, he adds.
“How do you get a quality wing into retail that the consumer can make at home and get a good product? How do you get a crispy wing when you cook it at home, whether it be in the air fryer or in an oven?” he asks. “We're actively working on a lot of technology around that.”
Pushing innovation at the plants
In terms of technological advances at the processing plant level, automation and robotics continue to be the primary focus for many equipment suppliers. Colin Usher, who is a senior research scientist and head of the robotics branch of the Intelligent Sustainable Technologies Division, which is part of the Aerospace Transportation Advanced Systems Lab at Georgia Tech Research Institute, says in some areas, the same challenges of automating the process or improving the accuracy remain in place, and that innovation there “has plateaued a bit.”
However, in other areas, Usher sees more specified and sometimes novel applications for robotics bubbling up to the surface.
“You are seeing a lot more automation and robotics in areas where you have a robotics station fulfilling a specific task, like knife sharpening or cheese cutting,” he says. “At a lot of the conferences and shows, companies are now showing systems that successfully integrate artificial intelligence sensing components as part of that, particularly in beef cutting and lamb cutting for example, where they've had success deploying algorithms into commercial products.”
Knife sharpening is a great fit for robotics applications, Usher says. At the end of a shift, workers will take all the knives and even some of the circular blades from the equipment to a work cell, where “a robot can automatically identify what type of knife it has in front of it, pick it up and sharpen it in a very repeatable fashion.”
It leads to a much more uniform sharpening because the robot can meet the parameters for the proper edge and angle with the right amount of time over and over again. And with the cost of robotics still coming down, systems like this are becoming more attractive to processors.
Usher gets excited about the new large language models (LLMs) and the new vision transformer-based artificial intelligence models being developed to improve computer image-recognition tasks in general industry.
“It is a different fundamental approach to artificial intelligence from convolutional neural networks versus transformer-based models, and the power and capabilities are pretty impressive,” he says. “There’s a lot of opportunity in sensing and decision making, and even down to the tasking of what your robots can do, based on these new transformer models.”
Furthermore, Usher says the industry is entering what he calls the “age of the data center,” and the possibilities for technological advancement are aplenty, once processors get on board.
“There are still a lot of companies that are hesitant to share their data with the cloud, but if you look at the way things are going, pretty soon you may have relatively low cost systems that are just sending pictures and images up to the cloud and returning decisions just as fast as voice-to-text recognition on our phones,” he explains.
“These data centers can crunch this data out for you and make really high-fidelity, really accurate decisions that you would not be able to otherwise do even with a single high-performance machine in your facility.”
These innovations are truly different from the traditional advances the industry typically sees, Usher says, but “there’s always work to be done,” even in the traditional, plant operations sense.
“Mechanized automation, especially with poultry processing, has made a lot of advances and is improving performance and yields — which make attractive, good systems,” he says. “But areas like loading product into machines or transferring product from a bin to a belt are still areas that have not been cracked with automation yet — and it's surprising it has taken so long.”
