Key Takeaways
- Automation has significantly reduced hazards, such as knives in meat processing, by removing manual tasks and integrating safety devices like sensors and guards.
- Strong leadership buy-in and a safety-focused culture are crucial for achieving better safety metrics and employee engagement.
- Emerging technologies like AI cameras, predictive analytics and advanced sensors are increasingly used to monitor and improve worker safety.
Ensuring your workers return home safely each night is a concern throughout most of the manufacturing world — though enhanced awareness, focus and technologies over the decades have made achievement of that goal a bit more common.
Automation, for one, has taken many of the most dangerous or repetitive tasks out of the hands and off the backs of the plant floor workers in many cases. And today, technological solutions continue to evolve to help safety teams ensure their peers are playing it safe.
In fact, safety professionals have turned to quite a few innovative solutions to help, according to EHS Today (a sister publication of Food Processing) in its 2025 National Safety and Salary Survey, part of its Winter 2025 issue.
More than half of the 662 respondents across a wide swath of the manufacturing industry (food & beverage safety professionals made up some 7% of respondents) said safety management systems (56%) and e-learning/micro-learning (54%) solutions were being used to improve safety outcomes at their facilities.
Nearly a quarter were using artificial intelligence tools (24%) to assist, and another 11% said they used predictive analytics — virutal reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) solutions made up 2% of responses. Meanwhile, physical “trinkets,” such as mobile devices (36%), wearable tech (11%) and even sensors on personal protective equipment (4%), helped others ensure positive safety outcomes.
In the food & beverage industry overall, threats to employee safety vary depending upon how many jobs have been automated. Yet, in some segments, such as the meat & poultry industry, manual labor remains the most efficient, best way to maximize yield.
Meat & poultry plants have historically been under a stronger microscope based on more than a century of issues around keeping their workers safe on the job. Yet, when compared to national benchmarks and statistics across all manufacturing sectors, those plants appear to be doing a much better job than they had in the 20th century, at the least.
The Meat Institute awards meat and poultry plants for effective safety and health programs based on OSHA safety data as evaluated by the National Safety Council, and the U.S. Poultry & Egg Assn. sponsors the Safety Recognition Award Program given out by the Joint Poultry Safety & Health Council. Each year, hundreds of meat & poultry plants receive some level of recognition for their work to keep people safe.
Committed to safety
The EHS Today survey asked safety professionals what the biggest challenge facing the profession was today, and the first two listed right true even based on anecdotal evidence. Those two challenges were getting buy-in from ownership for their jobs and programs, and then getting buy-in from workers.
Companies that have buy-in from the top down, such as Troutman, N.C.-based poultry processor Case Farms, typically produce better results, creating a safety-focused culture and keeping employees safe every day.
“From our very senior leadership, all the way from our CEO down to line-level employees, everyone has bought in; everyone sees the benefits,” explains Tyler Pariler, regional safety manager for Case Farms’ North Carolina divisions. Three Case Farms processing plants — its Goldsboro and Morganton, N.C., facilities, and its Canton, Ohio, plant — each received an Award of Distinction from the Joint Industry Safety and Health Council in 2025.
The company has a weekly safety call, which includes every member of the senior leadership team — the CEO, president, vice presidents, HR director, complex plant managers and live production managers — and everything safety-related that has happened at every location that week is discussed and analyzed with the highest individuals in our company.
“You’ve got to change the culture, and culture change starts at the top,” Parlier adds. “Once you get senior leadership buying in, everything else is easy.”
Jeff Shanabarger, regional safety manager for Case Farms’ Ohio Divisions, has been with Case Farms for about a decade and in the business for nearly 40 years, and has seen the growth of the worker safety culture as well as the results at Case Farms.
“We’re at a point now where we’re trying to match the previous year in our IR (incident rates) and DART (days away, restricted or transferred) rates,” he says. “It’s been an amazing journey in my 10 years to see where we came from to where we’re at now.”
Case Farms has facilities that have gone two years without a recordable incident and complexes that have celebrated 3 million man-hours without a lost-time incident. In August, Morganton celebrated reaching the 1 million man-hours milestone. Shanabarger says the employees truly are the backbone of the success here.
“We do safety luncheons and different events at each complex, and you can just see the excitement from associates wanting to help us get to the next level,” he says. “That’s what excites me most about working in safety here.”
Case Farms’ proactive approach to its program makes the difference, Parlier explains. The company treats and investigates any near-miss incidents as though they were lost-time incidents, because “the next time it could result in an injury.” Additionally, Parlier and Shanabarger share information between divisions constantly, acting as one team even though they oversee different facilities.
“If I have an injury in a department,” Parlier says, “every other location checks that same department — that’s how we turn reactive investigations into proactive prevention.”
Employee training from the start focuses heavily on safety, and supervisors and line leaders engage with line workers on how to work safely in their parts of the plant. Still, the company’s safety department executes the overall training program, not the line supervisors, controlling the message, style and importance of safety to every single employee.
Automation, as mentioned above, has made a huge difference in Case Farms’ ability to keep its workers safe, Shanabarger says, taking knives and scissors out of the hands of the human workers.
“Automation removed a major hazard, and that’s been huge,” he says. “Where we once had 100 people with knives, now we might have four.”
Parlier adds that automation suppliers also have built-in safety devices such as proper guarding, sensors and automatic proximity stops to up the ante on safety. And Case Farms’ safety department gets involved in equipment design with its partners early on to make sure no additional safeguards are needed.
In terms of collecting and analyzing safety data, Case Farms still uses “a little bit of both” old-school and innovative software. Parlier says they use software systems to track and analyze trends, but he is also a big fan of spreadsheets. On the flip side, the company also has started using AI-based cameras and tracking systems in its trucks to promote safer driving habits.
No matter how fancy the process is or not, Parlier adds, the data and information sharing is the important cog in staying ahead of the curve on worker safety — and whatever methods prove best, he says, “we’re definitely open to anything that can help us.”
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.