Dive Brief:
- Triumph Foods is expanding a pork processing plant near its headquarters in St. Joseph, Missouri. The project, scheduled to be completed by spring 2018, will add 12,000 square feet to an existing facility, reports News-Press Now.
- The company is also adding “robotic palletization technology" at the plant to increase outbound shipping speed and decrease manual handling of finished products.
- “This project is representative of the company’s continued commitment to implement innovative solutions aimed at improving customer service, upgrading ergonomics and enhancing our capability to produce and distribute new products to the market,” CEO Mark Campbell said in a statement.
Dive Insight:
Last year, Rabobank Food & Agribusiness Research and Advisory group reported that meat consumption on the whole posted its largest increase in 40 years. Packaged Facts also projects that meat and poultry will remain "mainstays and protein powerhouses" of a protein market forecast to approach $100 billion in 2021. By contrast, sales of meat substitutes are projected to remain relatively miniscule, at less than $2 billion around the same time.
To meet rising demand, big meat producers — Tyson, Foster Farms and Sanderson Farms — are building new plants and expanding and upgrading existing facilities. Maybe even more importantly, manufacturers are pumping capital into state-of-the-art locations and upgrades to improve operating efficiency. Just last month, meatpackers requested the U.S. Department of Agriculture approve a 25% increase in chicken processing-line speeds in an effort to keep pace with growing domestic and international demand for poultry and other meats.
Triumph Foods is following suit by upgrading and expanding some of its processing facilities. Last month, Seaboard Triumph Foods, a joint venture between Triumph Foods and Seaboard Foods, opened a new pork processing plant — complete with robotics and other innovative technologies — in Sioux City, Iowa. The plant is expected to employ 1,100 workers once it ramps up to full production. In June, Triumph completed a $1.5 million ham boning line expansion, creating 72 new jobs, according to News-Press Now.
“While initially this [new St. Joseph] project will not create additional positions directly, it allows us growth, which could translate to additional positions in the future,” Chris Clark, Triumph’s communications manager, told News-Press Now.
Industrywide, there could be some concern that increased use of technology and automation in plants will take opportunities away from the food workforce, so it's important that companies proactively retrain staff to run newly automated equipment. Increased product output could also create the need for more workers, as Triumph experienced with its ham boning line expansion project.
But could all these recent plant expansions and faster processing lines put too much meat on the market? It’s certainly possible. But given population projections, rising demand for meat exports and the fact that experts predict there won't be enough food to feed the world by 2050, the pros seems to outweigh the cons for now.