> Tyson said it installed plastic or plexiglass dividers along the cafeteria tables where employees eat lunch. Two employees said the cafeteria dividers probably helped to an extent, but they stressed that the cafeteria is always very crowded.
>The production line worker said the company provided bandanas at one point, but she said her colleagues who utilized them complained they were cheaply made and started fraying right away.
It sounds like they were trying to do something, but it's just really hard to keep ahead of this thing. I think food work is just fundamentally less safe right now.
But the Beyond Meat facility isn't the same miserable hellscape for employees:
>“You can come to our facility anytime,” Brown said in an interview on Tuesday. “Don’t call me, just knock on the door. I invite you to do the same with all of Chipotle’s meat-processing facilities. They won’t let you, and if they did, you wouldn’t want to see it.”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/no-beyond-burrito-...
Robots tend to be for lower-volume activities.
There is always work been done - for example on delicate fruit there are a host of companies and machines that do things like sorting and even picking. https://www.compacsort.com is a good example.
Robots tend to be for lower-volume: https://www.roboticsplus.co.nz/robotic-apple-packing
But for foods like potatoes the sorting machinery is pretty simple as spuds are easy to handle.
On the farm there are lots of solutions for automating the various process they have. The larger the farm the more is automated.
For example on a dairy farm you'll see milking machines that range from expensive robots (small, European farms) that allow no-touch operation, to inline or rotary milkers that allow decent volume with low/no touch etc.
https://www.waikatomilking.com/products/milking-parlors/rota...