What "Most Modern" Could Mean: A Plant-Floor Technology Analysis of Smithfield's $1.3B Future Build

Drawing on Smithfield's existing technology stack, global facility benchmarks, commercially available vendor systems, and the economics of labor, yield, and compliance, we predict what the plant floor will likely look like when operations begin in late 2028. The report covers  technology domains in stunning and harvest automation, carcass grading and yield optimization, robotic fabrication and deboning, food safety and pathogen control, refrigeration and automated cold storage, and packaging and enterprise software integration. 

Smithfield Foods has committed $1.3 billion to replace its 117-year-old Sioux Falls pork plant with a 1.1 million-square-foot greenfield facility. The company’s own language is clear: “The new facility will be the most modern of its kind in the U.S., featuring advanced automation technology and IT systems.”

“Modern” can mean incremental sensor upgrades and a fresh coat of paint. But a greenfield build at this capital intensity creates room for something different: a step-change in how a pork plant operates, not a renovation of how one already does.

Retrofitting automation into legacy buildings is constrained by ceiling heights, floor drains, column spacing, and decades of accumulated workarounds. A blank-sheet design eliminates those constraints.

This analysis decodes what “most modern” likely means in practical plant-floor terms by 2028. The method is straightforward: infer probable technology choices from Smithfield’s known foundation, global facility benchmarks, commercially available systems, and the economics of labor, yield, and regulatory compliance.

Smithfield announced the project on February 16, 2026. Site work begins spring 2026 at Foundation Park, a 1,000-acre heavy industrial site at the I-29/I-90 intersection in northwest Sioux Falls. Groundbreaking follows in H1 2027. Operations are targeted for late 2028.

The plant will process more than 20,000 hogs per day across 200 acres, combining fresh pork and packaged meats under one roof.

The $1.3 billion budget is nearly four times larger than Seaboard Triumph Foods’ $335 million Sioux City plant, which opened in 2017 as the last major greenfield pork facility built in the U.S. It exceeds the total lifetime investment in Danish Crown’s Horsens facility, widely regarded as Europe’s most automated pork operation.

The timing aligns with a broader strategic reshaping. Smithfield’s January 2025 Nasdaq IPO earmarked proceeds for infrastructure and automation. The company has closed underperforming facilities in several states while pivoting toward higher-margin packaged meats.

A greenfield plant allows integration “in the building’s DNA” rather than bolted on afterward. That difference is the enabling condition for everything that follows.

The company’s existing technology investments provide a reliable signal.

Smithfield’s most consequential IT initiative has been a SAP S/4HANA consolidation launched in 2015, unifying three separate SAP systems into a single global ERP instance with Accenture leading the implementation and workloads running across Virtustream, Azure, and AWS. That backbone will almost certainly extend to the new facility.

At the plant floor, Smithfield has deployed robotic carcass splitters and vision systems at its Tar Heel, North Carolina facility, the world’s largest pork plant at 35,000 head per day. Its Kinston, North Carolina prepared foods plant runs high-speed slicers, cook-and-chill systems, and robotic palletizers.

The company’s partnership with Lineage Logistics produced a fully automated distribution center in Olathe, Kansas, where 97% of product movement is handled by robotics and software across 62,000 pallet positions.

Where we see this going is SAP as the enterprise spine, growing comfort with robotic warehousing, and incremental automation on the production floor.

The new plant will likely run SAP S/4HANA integrated with a meat-specialist MES, either Frontmatec GO System or CSB-System, connected to Rockwell or Siemens PLCs and SCADA at the equipment layer.

The question is not whether Smithfield will build on this foundation. It is how far they push the frontier above it.

Stunning, Harvest, and Dressing Automation

A facility claiming “most modern” status will run CO₂ group stunning rather than electrical stunning.

Paternoster-style gondola systems lower groups of hogs into 80 to 90 percent CO₂ concentrations, reducing stress indicators and blood splash while producing measurably better meat quality. The dressing line will feature robotic stations handling belly opening, evisceration, brisket cutting, chine bone sawing, and carcass splitting, with automatic cleaning between each carcass.

Frontmatec’s AIRA robotic dressing line, the product of more than 20 years of iterative development with the Danish Meat Research Institute, performs automatic cleaning and disinfection between each carcass and can be configured for throughputs up to 1,400 heads per hour.

European vendors have refined these systems over two decades. They are commercially mature.

Every carcass will carry an RFID tag on the overhead rail from shackling through every processing stage to the final package, creating an unbroken digital chain. At a target throughput of 1,200 to 1,400 heads per hour, this is not experimental. It is the operating standard at Horsens and the baseline expectation for any greenfield build at this investment level.

Carcass Grading and Yield Optimization

Immediately post-harvest, every carcass will pass through an ultrasonic grading system scanning at 3,200 or more points across 16 transducers. The output is not a simple grade. It is a complete lean-to-fat profile predicting yield for every primal: ham, shoulder, loin, belly.

Plants using this technology report value gains of approximately $2.20 per pig from optimized sorting alone. Applied to 20,000 hogs per day, that represents roughly $16 million in annual incremental value.

Downstream, dual-energy X-ray systems will measure chemical lean content of trim at up to 35 tons per hour while simultaneously detecting bone fragments and foreign material. Eagle Product Inspection’s FA3/M DEXA technology discriminates fat from lean by atomic number differences in the X-ray absorption spectrum, reducing lean giveaway by up to 4 percent.

At grinding line entry points, Marel SensorX Magna systems will scan for bone fragments down to 2mm at 99 percent detection reliability with a false-positive rate below 3 percent, a threshold that eliminates the costly over-rejection that plagued earlier-generation systems.

The real shift is conceptual. Grading ceases to be a classification exercise and becomes a routing decision: AI models will direct each carcass to the cutting pattern that maximizes revenue against the real-time order book.

The grading system and the fabrication floor become a single feedback loop.

Robotic Fabrication and Deboning

Full robotic fabrication of a complete pork carcass does not exist commercially. That boundary is worth stating clearly.

But specific high-volume stations have been automated, and the new plant will deploy 8 to 15 robotic cutting stations alongside skilled human operators.

Companion systems handle shoulder deboning at 600 pieces per hour. Mayekawa’s newer CELLDAS system handles hip bone and tailbone removal in a three-robot cell using 3D scanning, X-ray, and AI-based path optimization, completing each pork leg in approximately 40 seconds.

Vision-guided portioning systems cut loins with 360-degree scanning at 600 cuts per minute, achieving fixed-weight portions with minimal giveaway. The JBT Marel I-Cut 56 uses Joint Item recognition to identify anatomical endpoints and servo-controlled blades that adjust cut trajectories in real time, a capability that reduces portion weight variance to fractions of a gram.

Fine trimming, belly processing, and soft-tissue quality inspection will remain manual.

The variability of connective tissue, membrane, and fat deposits in these cuts defeats current robotic gripping and sensing. These positions will shift from repetitive production-line work to higher-skilled quality roles.

The expected direct fabrication labor reduction is 30 to 40 percent versus a conventional plant at equivalent throughput.

Food Safety and Pathogen Control

The facility will almost certainly operate under USDA’s New Swine Inspection System, which shifts pre-inspection sorting to plant employees, reduces on-line FSIS inspectors, and grants flexibility to optimize line speeds.

A multi-hurdle pathogen intervention sequence will include steam pasteurization at 93 to 99 degrees Celsius, heated lactic acid spray, and additional organic acid treatments at multiple process points.

For ready-to-eat packaged meats produced on-site, High Pressure Processing at 6,000 bar will provide a terminal food safety step, achieving greater than five-log reductions while extending shelf life without chemical preservatives. An in-house pathogen lab running real-time PCR will deliver results within an hour of enrichment.

All food safety data will flow into a unified digital HACCP platform with immutable audit trails and automated deviation alerts.

The goal is not merely passing inspection. It is generating a continuous compliance record that functions as a competitive asset.

Refrigeration and Automated Cold Storage

The refrigeration system will center on a natural-refrigerant ammonia/CO₂ cascade architecture. Ammonia remains confined to the engine room while CO₂ circulates throughout production and storage areas, eliminating ammonia exposure risk in occupied zones and achieving 20 to 52 percent energy savings versus synthetic refrigerants.

Variable-speed compressors with electronic expansion valves on every evaporator will enable zone-based temperature optimization. Heat recovered from compressor discharge will supply hot water for scalding and sanitation.

The cold storage warehouse will feature a fully automated storage and retrieval system, likely holding 20,000 to 30,000 pallet positions with no human presence in the freezer environment.

These systems deliver up to 50 percent space reduction and 70 percent labor reduction in warehouse operations.

For a facility processing 20,000 hogs per day, automated cold storage is not an upgrade. It is the non-negotiable backbone of an integrated operation.

Packaging, Palletizing, and Enterprise Software

The packaging hall will approach near-zero human intervention from portioning through palletized finished goods.

Thermoformers with integrated robotics will handle automated loading with RFID-coded dies for rapid format changes. Multivac’s RX 4.0 platform uses a proprietary pixelHEAT system with individually controlled heating elements at the pixel level, delivering up to 30 percent energy savings while enabling the thinner, recyclable mono-material films that major retailers now require. Inline quality assurance will combine checkweighers, metal detection, X-ray inspection, and automated print-and-apply labeling encoding GS1-128 barcodes. End-of-line KUKA KR QUANTEC PA Arctic robots, the only palletizing platform rated for continuous operation at negative 30 degrees Celsius without a protective enclosure, will handle payloads up to 240 kilograms at 8 to 15 cycles per minute, moving finished goods directly into cold storage.

Above the equipment layer, the ISA-95 architecture ties everything together: PLCs and SCADA controlling individual machines, a meat-specialist MES managing production execution and traceability, SAP S/4HANA integrating enterprise planning, and AI-driven analytics optimizing yield, scheduling, and predictive maintenance.

The differentiator is not any single machine.

It is the integration: a facility where every carcass becomes data, and data becomes operating decisions in real time.

Hyperspectral imaging is the most promising. Inline systems capturing full spectral data at the pixel level can detect low-density contaminants invisible to conventional X-ray, including plastics, cartilage, and PSE defects. Processing speed constraints are diminishing rapidly.

Private 5G networks could provide the low-latency wireless backbone connecting hundreds of IoT sensors and robots across a million-square-foot facility without cabling complexity.

Autonomous mobile robots for intra-facility material transport offer flexible routing that adapts to changing production patterns.

Digital twins will likely debut in targeted subsystems: thermal processing simulation and cold-chain modeling, rather than a whole-facility replica. Key Sources:

“Most modern” does not mean the newest version of any single piece of equipment.

It means systemic integration: the ability to connect harvest data to cutting decisions, cutting decisions to packaging specifications, packaging output to warehouse logistics, and logistics to enterprise planning in a continuous loop.

Every technology described in this analysis exists commercially today. What makes this facility unprecedented is the design intent to combine them in a single greenfield build with a budget that permits no compromise.

A visitor walking the floor in 2029 will see robotic dressing lines, AI-routed carcasses, vision-guided portioners, automated packaging halls, and a cold storage warehouse that operates without a single person inside the freezer. They will not see the software layer connecting all of it. But that invisible layer, the digital nervous system turning physical throughput into continuous optimization, is what justifies the word “modern.”

The specificity of the machinery matters less than the fact that every machine talks to every other machine, and every decision is informed by data generated minutes earlier on the same floor.

We will be tracking this project closely over the next 18 months as Smithfield moves from site preparation into groundbreaking and equipment procurement. Vendor selections, permitting filings, and construction milestones will reveal whether the facility's technology ambitions match the trajectory outlined here. By late 2027, the equipment orders alone will tell us whether this plant is an incremental upgrade or the step-change the budget suggests it should be.