As a colleague of mine once joked, not meaning to be morbid, the needle on the last half of a tank of gas seems to go down more quickly than the first. I think of that when I find my aging self in a daze with how quickly time seems to be passing at an ever accelerating pace.

I recently had one of those moments while driving slowly down my street on an errand to fill up the tank, wearing a baseball cap, t-shirt, shorts and flip-flops on a weekday. I couldn’t imagine having to return to an office, with that commute taking at least two hours of my day.

Much has changed since the pandemic hit us more than three years ago. Still, the seismic event most of us might never experience again sometimes seems a distant memory, a fog that lifts only every so often in the reminders of how we work, how we interact, how we consume products, how we live our everyday lives.

In producing the August magazine, many reminders of the pandemic’s lasting and accelerating effects arose: how a packer is going all in on value-added services and mulling cooking capabilities to serve labor-strapped customers; how to-go and home-centric consumer habits forged amidst shutdowns will continue to reshape how foodservice outlets operate, and how processors supply them; and even how inflation has made meat a primary target for increasingly sophisticated thieves.

Clearly, in some ways, the pandemic brought out the worst in us, but in many others, it brought out the best. It’s never a bad time to take stock of both in your everyday business operations: What made you better through the experience, and how you can build on that; and what weaknesses came to bear that either need strengthening or jettisoning altogether.

Critical to surviving such a historic ordeal was adaptability, and the same characteristic will be necessary to thrive in the post-pandemic world. The pace is only accelerating; the competition for consumers’ dollars — particularly as millennial buying power grows, with Gen Z not too far behind — will be won by those who can deliver high-end quality the fastest and in the most convenient of formats.

Easier said than done, of course. Inflationary effects are easing, but labor remains a costly Achilles heel. It’s easy to say, “Just automate it,” but where that isn’t a fix, creative approaches to attracting, hiring, and retaining human workers is. The idea of a 9-to-5 job is becoming more of a foreign concept to them, so if flexibility in scheduling is a foreign concept to your management team, start to have those conversations. Employees want willing partners in their employers.

Meatpackers and processors not only have more of such internal demands, but also external ones from customers and others in the supply chain who will remember the extent to which their partnership mattered — when it mattered most. As labor further tightens and consolidation occurs in affiliated industries, they’ll seek one-stop shops with a full and flexible suite of services. The industry’s evolution from a commodity source to a culinary center is, accordingly, speeding up.

The dynamics unfolding in a changing normal are as fascinating as they are hard to keep up with. It’ll take a full tank of gas.

Editor's note: This article ran as the Editorial in the August issue of Meatingplace.

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