Back in 2016, I began researching and doing several interviews for a story on changes in meat plant design. At the time, production was booming, and there were several new, large facilities under construction.

My goal was to explore how new designs were evolving with consumer demands. A common thread, for example, was the installation of more windows, and sure enough, the intent among meatpackers was to address consumers’ increasing penchant for transparency.

But as far as I got into that work, I never did finish it. Recently, I recalled those efforts, but could not remember why I ceased them. Then it hit me: in August of that year, my wife and I had our second child, a boy. Life changed, and I don’t recall accomplishing much professionally for the rest of that year.

Nearly four years later, life has changed again. My boy is nearly 4 years old, and, along with his 11-year-old sister, is growing up in a pandemic that is confining them largely to their small house. My wife and I, meanwhile, are completing several home improvement projects.

It’s a new life, too, for the meatpacking industry, which is taking punches left and right from COVID-19 in the confines of its processing plants as it continues to do the essential work of putting product in meat cases nationwide. At the same time, operators are doing whatever they can do to reconfigure the workspace to make it as safe as possible for workers.

Major design and construction firms were just finishing the latest building boom, and now, with COVID-19 presenting a new type of threat on the fab floor, they’re already having to go back to the drawing board in some ways. Another of the common themes among those designs a few years back was the improvement of worker common areas, and — as Managing Editor Peter Thomas Ricci reports in our lead Issues story, “The ‘after’ life” on p. 30 — those efforts continue to be adapted amid COVID-19.

As you’ll read, however, we further explore how such adaptations represent improvements not just from a few years ago, but also upon standard disassembly lines that sprouted at the turn of the 20th century. That’s when the U.S. meatpacking industry became a modern marvel of production efficiency, but it’s also when some of the vulnerabilities of the system — which the COVID-19 pandemic has spotlighted — also took shape. The virus has, in particular, put a focus on the concept of space.

With the need, in general, for more of it, and with demand ever strong, the largest-sized meatpacking plants will continue to be necessary as the nation produces record volumes of product. Meanwhile, though, new thought is being given to diversifying the portfolio with smaller, mid-sized regional plants as insurance against potential large-scale closures, and even mobile, modular slaughter units to help farmers out of such a bind. And we’re not talking about boutique butchering in grandpa’s barn; we’re talking about operations with at least 500 animals.

For me, it’s a whole other animal having a rambunctious toddler son, compared with an easygoing and independent pre-teen daughter. It has added stress, turned more hairs gray, and tested my patience; heck, it’s sometimes brought out the worst in me. But I know that my life is fuller, and that I’ll be a better father for it in the end.

COVID-19 is similarly putting an unprecedented amount of stress on the meat industry, and in some ways showing some of its shortcomings. But the pandemic also is showing its strengths, among which is its adaptability, and accelerating concepts that are likely to make the industry better now and in the future.

This article ran as the Editorial in the June issue of Meatingplace magazine.

Second child

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