Processing

Raw grain is not a Dorito. Getting from one to the other requires a set of industrial transformations — physical, chemical, biological — that disassemble the original plant or animal into fractional components that can be recombined into shelf-stable, cosmetically uniform, globally consistent products. Processing is where agricultural output becomes the food system we actually experience.

What It Is

Processing is the industrial phase where raw agricultural commodities are transformed into finished or intermediate products: food, feed, fuel, and industrial inputs. The processing sector divides into five distinct streams, each with its own industrial logic, resource intensity, and output.

How It Works

Food and beverage manufacturing handles both crop-based ingredients and animal protein. On the crop side, corn enters wet milling: starch is separated from fiber and protein, then enzymatically converted into High Fructose Corn Syrup, glucose, and other fractions found throughout the packaged food supply. Soybeans are crushed and washed with hexane — a petroleum-derived solvent — to extract oil; the remaining meal becomes protein-dense animal feed. On the animal side, meatpacking involves slaughter, evisceration, and “fabrication” — the breakdown of carcasses into retail cuts. This work remains heavily manual because animal bodies are not geometrically uniform; robotic knife-work at scale is an active engineering frontier but not yet economically viable for most applications.

Biofuel production acquires roughly 40% of the entire US corn crop (USDA ERS). Corn is milled, liquefied, treated with enzymes to convert starch to sugar, fermented with yeast, and distilled into ethanol. The operation is highly automated — SCADA and PLC systems manage fermentation temperatures and distillation columns continuously. The byproduct, Distillers Dried Grains with Solubles (DDGS), is a high-protein feed ingredient sold back into the livestock sector, partially closing a nutrient loop.

Animal feed manufacturing operates in industrial feed mills using hammer mills and roller mills to crush grain and a steam-pelleting process to bind it into uniform pellets. Micro-ingredient dosing — mixing precise amounts of amino acids, vitamins, and medications into tons of base feed — requires automated metering systems with tolerances of a few tenths of a percent. Grain dust in concentrations above approximately 40 g/m³ is explosive (OSHA Grain Handling Facilities Standard, 29 CFR 1910.272); mill HVAC design is as much a safety engineering problem as a process engineering one.

Fresh produce packing is the gentlest form of processing: washing, sorting, and packaging while the biological asset remains alive. Optical sorting systems — high-speed cameras and air jets inspecting millions of pieces per hour — are the frontier technology here, rejecting blemished or oddly shaped items with mechanical precision and no appeal.

Global commodity trading handles the export stream. The “ABCD” companies — Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge, Cargill, and Louis Dreyfus — move bulk grain from US river terminals onto Panamax ocean vessels bound for China, Mexico, Egypt, and a hundred other destinations. Their competitive advantage is logistical control: they own the terminals, the elevators, and in some cases the vessels. Commodity arbitrage is their business model.

Why It Matters

Processing determines what the food system actually delivers to human bodies. Fractionating whole corn into starch and isolating soybean oil from its natural fiber and phytonutrient matrix produces calorie-dense, nutrient-poor ingredients that recombine into the ultra-processed products that now comprise more than 55% of the average American adult’s caloric intake — and over 60% for children (CDC NCHS Data Brief No. 536, 2025). The food system is extraordinarily efficient at this.

The human cost at the meatpacking line is among the highest of any American industry. Line speeds require workers to make thousands of repetitive knife cuts per shift in cold environments. Injury rates, musculoskeletal disorders, and respiratory conditions from chemical exposure are chronic features of the work, not aberrations.

What’s Being Done

The problems described above are real and entrenched — but a set of developments in 2024–2026 shows that the leverage points are more accessible than they appeared even five years ago, and that change is arriving from unexpected directions simultaneously.

Efforts Showing Results

California AB 1264 and the UPF Regulatory Wave. Signed by Governor Newsom in October 2025, AB 1264 is the first US law to write a legal definition of ultra-processed foods into statute, identify products of concern through a UC-linked scientific process by 2028, and ban them from K-12 school meals by July 2032. Texas, Louisiana, and Arizona have enacted parallel state-level restrictions. California’s ~$800 billion food retail market means manufacturers serving school channels must reformulate nationally, not just in one state. The FDA’s parallel Request for Information on UPF definitions, issued in July 2025, signals that federal codification is plausible within the next administration cycle. The 2032 implementation date is long enough to be credible — and early-moving manufacturers will face lower reformulation costs and less regulatory uncertainty than those who wait.

LanzaJet Freedom Pines — First Commercial Ethanol-to-Jet Fuel Plant. LanzaJet’s 10-million-gallon-per-year facility in Soperton, Georgia began full commercial operations in November 2025, producing sustainable aviation fuel and renewable diesel from ethanol using alcohol-to-jet (ATJ) technology. The technology is at commercial scale — a genuine milestone. What makes this meaningful for food-fuel competition is that the plant’s economics reward low-carbon-intensity feedstocks: LanzaJet is currently importing Brazilian ethanol because US corn ethanol cannot meet the 50% greenhouse gas reduction threshold required by the Section 45Z tax credit. If cellulosic or waste-based ethanol feedstocks scale up, this pathway could progressively decouple the biofuel industry from food-competitive corn without requiring a politically costly RFS reduction.

UFCW Historic JBS Contract — Ergonomics and Paid Leave. Ratified in May 2025, the UFCW contract with JBS USA — one of America’s two largest beef processors — established the first-ever dedicated ergonomic safety program, paid sick leave, walking union stewards on production lines, and strengthened joint safety committees across all JBS US facilities. Contractual provisions are more durable than agency guidance: they are legally binding on the employer and cannot be rescinded by an administration. Union-covered meatpacking workers already earn 12.8% more on average than non-union peers and have meaningfully better safety outcomes. The JBS contract creates a benchmarking effect for other large processors; the next targets are Tyson Foods and Smithfield.

China’s Antitrust Review of Bunge-Viterra as an Accidental Constraint on Consolidation. The $34 billion Bunge-Viterra merger — which would create the second-largest global grain trader — was approved by the EU in August 2024 but has stalled indefinitely pending Chinese regulatory review as of mid-2025. China’s motivation is food security self-interest rather than universal competition principles, making it an unreliable precedent — but the effect is real: the merger is paused, and the 9th BRICS International Competition Conference presented research showing the deal could cost farmers and consumers $2.5 billion annually in logistics markups. This illustrates that geopolitical rivalry can sometimes produce pro-competition outcomes, even when domestic antitrust agencies have not acted.

Where More Work Is Needed

No viable policy mechanism to reduce the corn ethanol mandate. The Renewable Fuel Standard’s 15-billion-gallon corn ethanol floor is protected by a durable farm-state bipartisan coalition in Congress, and the 2025 “One Big Beautiful Bill” extended conventional biofuel eligibility rather than constraining it. No administration has been willing to absorb the political cost of reducing the mandate, despite the food-fuel competition, fertilizer pollution, and net carbon emissions that result. The most tractable near-term approach is decoupling future RFS volume increases from corn starch — requiring all new obligations above the current floor to be met only by cellulosic, waste-based, or advanced biofuels — and creating a food security carve-out allowing EPA to temporarily waive ethanol mandates during domestic or global food price spikes. The EU’s 2018 Renewable Energy Directive II, which capped food-crop biofuels at 7% of transport energy with a phase-down trajectory, demonstrates this is politically achievable when designed to protect existing investments while limiting further expansion.

No federal definition or labeling standard for ultra-processed foods. The FDA’s July 2025 Request for Information is the first federal step toward a UPF definition, but it will take years to become a rule. Meanwhile, California defines UPFs by ingredients and nutrients; Louisiana lists 15 specific banned ingredients; Texas lists 44 additives — a patchwork that harms both consumers trying to make informed choices and manufacturers trying to comply. Chile’s Law of Food Labeling and Advertising, which mandated black octagon warning labels on high-sugar, high-sodium, and high-fat products, reduced UPF purchases by 24% in clinical studies and triggered significant industry reformulation. A federal UPF definition modeled on California AB 1264 — finalized by 2027 before the state patchwork fully entrenches — would benefit public health and manufacturer compliance simultaneously.

No binding federal ergonomics standard for meatpacking. OSHA promulgated an ergonomics standard in 2000; Congress voted to rescind it in 2001 under the Congressional Review Act, and the CRA legally prohibits promulgating a “substantially similar” rule without new congressional authorization. OSHA has expanded inspection guidance (October 2024) but inspectors can only cite General Duty Clause violations, not levy consistent penalties under a codified standard. Carpal tunnel incidence in meatpacking remains over 7 times the national average as a direct result. The clearest path is new congressional ergonomics legislation explicitly authorizing OSHA to promulgate an industry-specific standard for meat and poultry processing — modeled on Norway and Denmark, where mandatory job rotation, tool design standards, and union enforcement have produced substantially lower repetitive-strain injury rates despite similar throughput.

The American food processing system is not broken beyond repair — it is a set of policy choices that can be unmade. The 40% of corn burned as ethanol exists because Congress created the Renewable Fuel Standard; a Georgia plant now making jet fuel from ethanol shows what a different set of incentives could produce. The 55% of adult calories coming from ultra-processed foods exists because a regulatory vacuum allowed it; California just proved that vacuum can be filled. The meatpacking workers suffering carpal tunnel at seven times the national average suffer because a Senate vote in 2001 repealed a protective rule; a union contract in 2025 showed that protection is achievable without waiting for Congress. The status quo in each of these areas is a policy artifact, not a law of nature — and the convergence of state legislation, union contracts, commercial technology milestones, and even accidental antitrust pressure from geopolitical rivals means the leverage points are more accessible right now than they have been in decades.