How Smithfield Foods unified EHS+ across 40 plants to simplify risk management

40+

Facilities Standardized

Corporate Documents Consolidated

237

Audits Down From 3–4

1.5 Days

Hidden Issue in the Data, Now a #1 Priority.

Ergonomics

THE CONTEXT

Smithfield Foods

An iconic pork producer and food-processing company known for producing some of the most popular food products in the world.

As the world's largest pork processor, Smithfield is responsible forkeeping tens of thousands of people safe across 40-plus processing plants, hog farms, grain facilities, distribution centers, and a national transportation fleet. With many environments and varying risk profiles, Smithfield needed a more comprehensive, converged EHS+ approach to support its people.

THE CHALLENGE

The paramedic and the farm kid

EJ Klages came to Smithfield Foods as a paramedic. Twenty-five years of responding to emergencies taught her the difference between treating an injury and preventing one. Bryn Jensson came from farm country in Illinois, with a bone-deep understanding of why people needed to get home safe. Neither of them planned on becoming EHS professionals, but today they are Corporate Directors of EHS at Smithfield Foods—and their passion for safety runs deep.

Both EJ and Bryn were determined to carry out their mission of providing a safer work environment. But the hodgepodge of management systems across locations, all operating in very different ways, created a huge challenge.

“We were a SharePoint, Excel, shared network drive nightmare. Information was everywhere, from filing cabinets to storing it online,” Bryn explains.

This chaos was compounded by external factors

THE PROBLEM

When processes feel like a black hole

When Smithfield grew through acquisitions, it inherited a patchwork of systems, processes, and workflows that never quite fit together. Even when incident investigations were filed and corrective actions were written down, they often went nowhere.

Traceability and follow-up were ongoing issues. "We knew what corrective actions we wanted to do," EJ says. "Did they actually get done? Did they get done across the board? Were we maintaining them for future employees, for future locations? The answer was no because the injuries and things continued."

Industrial hygiene data was scattered across sites, and when the EHS professional who managed a

program moved on, the data often went with them. Document control had spiraled into 237 corporate documents localized for each location. This made version control particularly difficult because best practices and regulation updates would get lost.

In practice, this meant that forty facilities were dealing with the same issues, but the solutions weren’t being standardized.

"Without being able to share our learnings from incidents or our best practices," Bryn says, "we would just continue to have the same type of injuries.”

THE APPROACH

From data siloes to a unified system

Despite having a great team, Smithfield discovered that good intentions don’t equate to practical, effective systems. Or, as EJ put it: “Even with the best intentions, getting information was a challenge. So nothing changed.”

When Smithfield implemented Cority, its focus was to make documentation visible and accessible across locations, especially for corporate staff.

“We had no system prior to Cority. It was all Excel files, Word documents, and hopes and dreams,” according to Bryn. There were many things the team had no idea about because they were used to paper systems stored in filing cabinets across plants.

THE TRANSFORMATION

Start with the weakest link

EJ and Bryn had a name for what happens when you try to do everything at once:

These are the programs that generate excitement, take a lot of effort, and quickly die out. They were determined not to let this happen again.

one-hit wonders.

So they started by addressing their weakest link first:

Incident Investigation

But EJ and Bryn are the first to admit it wasn’t a seamless process. At one point, management of change turned out to be overcomplicated, and they had to rebuild it from scratch. "We had the courage to say we screwed up and we need to fix this," Bryn says.

After years of hard work and determination, now every new module announcement is met with excitement rather than reluctance.

THE OUTCOME

Continually finding new opportunities

Now that EJ and Bryn have access to unified data in Cority, they are always finding new opportunities to improve the health and safety of employees. For example, thanks to transparent, traceable data, they could identifyrecurring patterns of ergonomic issues.

"Ergonomic issues really started to come to the forefront," EJ says. "It just came slapping us in the face as we looked at our 2025 data. We had the information to go to our corporate team and say: this is where we need to focus."

But the successes don’t end there. Since rolling out Cority at Smithfield, the team has achieved the following wins:

An unexpected benefit of partnering with Cority is that it provided a platform to start more conversations. After implementation began, EJ and Bryn started holding Cority office hours. This brought people together so they could start asking each other questions—and stay ready for whatever comes next.

As for her favorite thing about Cority, Bryn shares that she loves how having the systems encourages others to think creatively and proactively about EHS initiatives.

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