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Cargill, the world’s largest agrifood company, uses its AI camera system “CarVe” to recover even the 0.5% of lean meat that was previously left on cattle bones and discarded. Applied across Cargill’s annual production volume, this could create new value equivalent to 110,000 head of cattle, or approximately KRW 337 billion, without any additional raw material input. Cargill’s case shows that in an era when supply shortages and rising costs are undermining the traditional “economies of scale,” the survival formula for companies is shifting from “cutting marginal costs” to “maximizing marginal yield.” Instead of securing more resources at lower prices, companies must precisely identify the value being discarded from resources they have already secured. However, if AI is perceived not just as a tool for improving yield but also as a means of monitoring and pressuring individual workers’ performance in real time, productivity innovation could lead to labor-management conflict and operational disruption. AI-based process innovation must be designed not only for technological accuracy but also for trust and acceptance on the front lines.

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October 2025, Des Moines, Iowa, the United States. Taking the stage at the “Borlaug Dialogue,” a prestigious forum on global food security, Cargill Chairman and CEO Brian Sikes raised a somewhat unexpected topic.

What he boasted about was neither cutting-edge seed technology nor a major merger or acquisition (M&A). It was “small pieces of lean meat left on cattle bones.” Sikes explained that Cargill was using its internally developed AI camera system “CarVe” to recover, without missing a single piece, the meat scraps that used to be discarded on bones during the slaughtering process.

Sikes said, “I think this is the most innovative technology of my lifetime.” He went on to say, “Even if a technology can raise yield by just 1%, we must seize the opportunity it offers,” and emphasized, “Looking back 10 years from now, companies that fail to seize the opportunities this technology offers will ultimately fall behind in the competition.” Cargill — the world’s largest grain company, one of the three largest U.S. meat processors, and the largest privately held company in the United States, with annual revenue exceeding KRW 200 trillion — has built a vast agrifood empire over 160 years. DBR analyzed why Cargill is now going to such lengths to recover even the small pieces of meat left on cattle bones.




AI Finds the 0.5% Even Skilled Workers Missed

Deboning, the process of removing meat from bones, is a grueling job that workers typically avoid. Yet it still cannot be fully automated and must be done by hand. Beef deboning, in particular, is considered the “last frontier” of industrial automation because it is one of the most difficult processes to master.

Poultry such as chickens and ducks, being smaller and more uniform in size, has progressed the furthest in deboning automation. Pork processing has also partially adopted automated machinery, but manual work by skilled workers remains essential.

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