COVID-19 has forced both independent third party auditors and representatives from companies that buy large amounts of meat to do many audits by remote video. Would the video methods learned during the pandemic make it possible to eliminate all in-person visits to plants for either animal welfare or food safety audits? My prediction is these new video technologies will make it possible to reduce the number of in-person visits but not eliminate them. Some plant managers would like to eliminate all the in-person visits. However, there are some large meat buyers who would not trust total elimination of in-person visits.
For years, many large meat companies have installed video cameras that are monitored by an auditing company such as Arrowsight. Stationary cameras are located at the unloading ramp, crowd pen, stunning area, and bleed rail. Auditors in a remote location can measure falls, electric prod use, percentage of animals stunned correctly, and insensibility (unconsciousness), One advantage of these cameras is that the plant employees never know when the auditor is watching. This prevents the problems of the employees acting good when they see a person with a clipboard. When these cameras were first installed, they resulted in some great improvements in handling and stunning. To be effective, the cameras must be monitored by people working for an outside firm that sends the managers reports. Monitoring by plant management is less effective. I have observed that when the novelty wears off, they often stopped watching them. They have to be monitored by a person who actually performs numerical scoring of the different animal based measures. The daily scores are tabulated and sent to plant management.
To replace a person visiting the plant, a third party auditor sitting in their home could direct a plant employee to walk with a camera and show them what they wanted to see. One method is to use a police body camera that automatically reports to a cloud server when the camera is on and when it is off. This provides a report that is date and time stamped.
If I was a meat buyer, I would be willing to use this to replace many in-person audits in plants I was familiar with. I can think of six plants where I know every nook and cranny and I could direct the camera person to show them all to me. I would absolutely not trust this for plants I have never visited. Somebody said to me that they could send me a floor plan. The problem is that I would have no way of knowing if the floor plan was genuine. During my career, I have seen every possible method to create fake paperwork.
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