Clay Eastwood, PhD, applied meat scientist with PIC, was recently interviewed by The Pig Site’s Sarah Mikesell at the 2026 World Pork Expo in Des Moines, Iowa, US.
Today's consumers expect high quality flavorful protein options in an increasingly competitive marketplace and meeting that expectation starts with better data.
Dr. Eastwood, what is PIC's Pork Chop Studio, and why is this new technology so significant to the pork industry?
Diving into the Pork Chop Studio system, it's an advanced imaging system that uses computer vision and deep learning. It’s basically a camera that is able to take high-resolution images that reveal extremely fine details. From there, the system is able to then evaluate pork quality traits.
What benefits does the system offer?
There are many benefits. When you think about how we've historically captured this data, we monitored pork quality traits such as marbling, color, pH and tenderness through trained evaluators or specialized tools like pH meters and colorimeters that could collect the data.
Anytime we use subjective-type scoring for color or marbling – humans are humans. We make mistakes, we get fatigued over time.
Anytime we can add objectivity to that data, it makes the data coming back to us for our selection program even stronger and better, and we're able to do it at scale. That's one of the biggest benefits of the system.
When we can get objective data that feeds back into our selection program, it supports how we make informed selection decisions.
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