Tyson takes lead as pandemic-plagued meatpackers try to introduce robotics to the craft of meatcutting

Wall Street Journal chart

Meatpackers plagued by the coronavirus "are searching for a long-term solution" to chronic problems exacerbated by the pandemic, report The Wall Street Journal's Jacob Bunge and Jesse Newman. No. 1 processor Tyson Foods is "pushing into robotics, a development the industry has been slow to embrace and has struggled to adopt."

Tyson teams that include "designers who once worked in the auto industry are developing an automated deboning system destined to handle some of the roughly 39 million chickens slaughtered, plucked and sliced up each week in Tyson plants," the Journal reports. "Deboning livestock and slicing up chickens has long been hands-on labor. Low-paid workers using knives and saws work on carcasses moving steadily down production lines.

"It is labor-intensive and dangerous work. Those factory floors have been especially conducive to spreading coronavirus. In April and May, more than 17,300 meat and poultry processing workers in 29 states were infected and 91 died, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Plant shutdowns reduced U.S. beef and pork production by more than one-third in late April." That was "a debacle for the $213 billion U.S. meat industry. For the first time in memory for some Americans, there wasn’t enough meat to go around."

Robotic meatcutting is a challenge, the reporters write: "Executives of Tyson and other meat giants, including JBS USA Holdings Inc. and Cargill Inc., say that is because robots can’t yet match humans’ ability to disassemble animal carcasses that subtly differ in size and shape. While some robots, such as automated 'back saw' cutters that split hog carcasses along the spinal column, labor alongside humans in plants, the finer cutting, such as trimming fat, for now largely remains in the hands of human workers, many of them immigrants."