When I started my first journalism job in 1998, one of the first things that I had to do was set up my own email account – on AOL – because that company didn’t have an email address system for its employees yet. Technology had improved some aspects of trade journalism – thankfully we were well past the point of laying pages out by hand. But some parts of the process took longer to adapt to modern times than others.
If you’ve been in the meat industry for a couple of decades, you’ve seen technology changes yourself. Sure, a smokehouse or a grinder you’re using today functions in much the same way as one from 20 or 30 years ago, but the technology in the equipment is much more advanced. Did you ever imagine that you could get notifications about your smokehouse performance on your phone? The work that your company does may not have changed all that much, but the way it gets things done is probably very different.