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Innovation on the Menu: How Tyson Foods Engineering is Revolutionizing Food Tech

Published Sep 12, 2023

Updated Aug 22, 2024

3 min read

In this podcast episode, Tracy Lee, the host of the Engineering Leadership series, interviews Danyel Bischof-Forsyth, the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Tyson Foods. The episode provides insights into Danyel’s journey to becoming the CTO of Tyson Foods and discusses her role in leading technology initiatives within the company.

Danyel introduces herself as the CTO of Tyson Foods and shares her background, which includes being a computer science graduate with an MBA. She started her career in technology 33 years ago and previously held the position of Business Unit CIO for Hallmark Cards.

The conversation then moves to Danyel’s decision to move to Tyson Foods. She explains that the opportunity to lead technology transformation in a company that was rapidly growing and investing in digital technology intrigued her. She highlights her willingness to take on new challenges, learn about different industries, and work with emerging technologies as key factors in her career choice.

Danyel also discusses the exciting technologies Tyson Foods has been implementing. These technologies include computer vision, IoT sensors, artificial intelligence, and predictive analytics. She explains how these technologies are used to monitor and optimize various aspects of Tyson Foods' operations, such as production lines, employee safety, and product quality.

Tracy and Danyel speak about the decision-making process for technology initiatives at Tyson Foods. She describes a structured approach that involves a technology committee comprising C-suite members and their delegates who prioritize technology projects based on their value to the organization. The committee uses a scoring process to make these decisions.

The episode also covers Tyson Foods' three-year technology roadmap, which aligns with the company's business goals. Danyel explains that her team works closely with business units to integrate technology into their strategic plans. They prioritize projects based on their potential impact and align them with the roadmap.

Tracy asks about Tyson Foods' approach to innovation. Danyel reveals that the company encourages innovation through an initiative that involves generating ideas, investigating them, piloting select ideas, and scaling the most promising ones. She emphasizes the importance of fostering a culture of innovation.

The conversation shifts to Danyel’s involvement in women in technology programs. She shares that she has initiated and led women in tech programs at both Hallmark Cards and Tyson Foods. These programs aim to connect, grow, and inspire women in the technology field. They offer mentorship, training, and networking opportunities.

Tracy and Danyel discuss the significance of having a clear mission and goals for women in tech programs, as well as the importance of retaining women in technology roles.

In summary, this podcast episode explores Danyel’s journey to becoming CTO, the technology initiatives at Tyson Foods, the decision-making process for technology projects, technology roadmaps, innovation strategies, and women in technology programs. It provides valuable insights into the role of a CTO in a leading company and the evolving landscape of technology in the food industry.

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Opening the page we get our author results. joins Not using an ORM means we have full control over our own destiny. Like anything else though, this has tradeoffs. Let’s look at a query to fetch the list of posts that includes author and tags information. ` Let’s walk through each part of the query and highlight some pros and cons. ` * The query selects all columns from the posts table. * It also selects the name column from the authors table and renames it to author_name. * It aggregates the name column from the tags table into a JSON array. If there are no tags, it returns an empty JSON array. This aggregated result is renamed to tags. ` * The query starts by selecting data from the posts table. * It then joins the authors table to include author information for each post, matching posts to authors using the author_id column in posts and the id column in authors. * Next, it left joins the posts_tags table to include tag associations for each post, ensuring that all posts are included even if they have no tags. * Next, it left joins the tags table to include tag names, matching tags to posts using the tag_id column in posts_tags and the id column in tags. * Finally, group the results by the post id so that all rows with the same post id are combined in a single row SQL provides a lot of power to query our data in interesting ways. JOIN ’s will typically be more performant than performing additional queries.You could just as easily write a simpler version of this query that uses subqueries to fetch post tags and join all the data by hand with JavaScript. This is the nice thing about writing SQL, you’re free to fetch and handle your data how you please. Our results should look similar to this: ` This brings us to our next topic. Marshaling / coercing result data A couple of things we notice about the format of the result data our query provides: Rows are flat. We join the author directly onto the post and prefix its column names with author. ` Using an ORM we might get the data back as a child object: ` Another thing is that our tags data is a JSON string and not a JavaScript array. This means that we will need to parse it ourselves. ` This isn’t the end of the world but it is some more work on our end to coerce the result data into the format that we actually want. 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Dec 18, 2024

4 mins

stripe

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Innovation on the Menu: How Tyson Foods Engineering is Revolutionizing Food Tech

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