Tyson bets on robots to do some meat industry jobs

When you visit a meat plant, humans are completing tasks like stacking pallets and packing chicken drumsticks. But Tyson Foods Inc. thinks robots can do it all.

The U.S. meat giant is betting that automation and robotics can alleviate a worker shortage that has long hampered the industry. The company has built the 26,000-squarefoot, multimillion-dollar Tyson Manufacturing Automation Center near its headquarters in Springdale, Arkansas. At the facility, engineers will apply the latest advances in machine learning to meat manufacturing, with the goal of eventually eliminating jobs that can be physically demanding, highly repetitive and at times dangerous.

As global demand for meat rises, producers have had a hard time attracting enough workers to keep up with rising consumption. Some in the industry have pointed to Donald Trump’s tough stand on immigration as exacerbating the U.S. labor shortages. Producers including Pilgrim’s Pride and Cargill have boosted pay in some cases, and offered other benefits like new housing, health care and transportation incentives.

“We’ve got to get out in front of this,” said Marty Linn, director of the new center who, before coming to Tyson, spent 30 years at General Motors Co. “We’re not going to outsource” these tasks, “we’re going to produce them here in this country, so automation is a key strategy for us going forward,” he said.

Tech advances are making strides in automation possible. For example, machine vision is now accurate and speedy enough to apply to meat production, which is highly labor intensive compared with other food manufacturing. Also, a lot of washing and sanitizing occurs in a meatpacking plant, which has traditionally been difficult on robots, but now the machines are built to withstand that.