Just yesterday, Smithfield Foods announced that its new plant manager for the sprawling Tar Heel complex is Andrea Tucker, the first time a woman has held that position.

Frankly, I am of two minds when announcements like this come down the pike. On the one hand, in 2022 I feel this kind of news ought to be normalized — something so ho-hum, everyday that it warrants mention, but perhaps not big headlines. Sort of like my favorite football coaching order: “When you get into the end zone, act like you’ve been there before.”

But Tucker’s promotion isn’t ho-hum. Tar Heel is not any other processing facility: The world’s largest, it has the capacity to slaughter 35,000 head a day, which means that that plant alone handles more than 10% of the country’s pork processing business.

That kind of footprint draws an outsized amount of attention, from environmentalists, from animal activists, community activists seeking to protect and improve the lives of nearby residents, regulators and lawmakers, and — of course — attorneys.

The facility employs nearly 5,000 people, which puts it among only a few dozen factories in the U.S., in any industry, with a payroll of that size.

Altogether, Tar Heel represents perhaps the knottiest set of priorities and competing interests in the meat industry, which is itself maddeningly complex by its very nature.

Tucker is no token manager. She’s been running Smithfield’s bacon facility in Wilson, N.C., for three years, with a payroll of just under 700. She’s worked in Smithfield plants in one capacity or another for almost 20 years. It’s a sure bet she’s been kicking it with “the guys” her whole career, and she’s clearly good at it.

And while women are still under-represented in the operating areas of the meat industry, their influence is growing — even outside the laboratories, where many of the specialists are female. Consider the career trajectory of Nicole Johnson-Hoffman, who moved from Cargill’s legal team to operations, to running that company’s massive Fort Morgan, Colo., beef plant, to handling the relationship with McDonald’s for OSI, and now to CEO of Future Meat Technologies, an Israel-based cultivated meat company.

It’s faint, but a path to leadership for women in the meat industry does exist.

Because of her gender, Tucker’s performance in the job will be closely watched. Ironically, the better she does in her job, the less the world will hear about it. And the less attention the world pays to events in Tar Heel, the more the meat industry should seek to understand how that plant’s leadership does what it does.

I expect that learning from Tucker’s experience is going to be an important element of the careers of women — and men — in the meat industry for years to come.

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