Developers and engineers who participate in hackathons are familiar with the rules. An organizer brings programmers together to work on either an existing or new problem for a mutually agreed upon amount of time, usually 48 to 72 hours. In that time, developers might break up into teams or work alone. But once they have understood the challenge presented to them, they sequester themselves to write code. After hours of sleeplessness and caffeine overdoses, the teams present a demo. These showcase working prototypes, rudimentary applications, or higher-fidelity interfaces on occasion. On the other side of this marathon of coding, developers walk out exhausted. But often, they leave with code that can solve a problem.

So what happens when this playbook is directed at something offbeat—like meat production and sustainability? Last week, we found out. Several entrepreneurs, food advocates, meat producers, and developers got together in New York City for the Hack//Meat event. The challenges facing the meat industry and its consumers are vast: food safety, reducing methane emissions, improving meat quality, and helping both industrial and small local farmers among others. And all went according to plan: the hackathon model delivered unexpected results when applied to these problems.

The event brought six challenges from various figures in the industry. For fans of cutesy puns, these six organizations were labeled the “steakholders” and their roles resembled those of traditional clients (at least at first). The group included the Vermont Processing Group, Applegate Farms, Consumers Union, Food & Water Watch, Grace Communications, and the Environmental Working group. Representatives from each worked with three self-selected developer teams for 48 hours.

In the first phases of Hack//Meat, the participants shook hands, met representatives of the six organizations, snacked on foods that included—you guessed it—meat, and rolled up their sleeves to do the work. But what became apparent very quickly was the difficulty in presenting these challenges to participating hackers. Meat is an issue that unravels itself into many problems and topics, and the role of client wasn’t going to work for the organizations presenting the challenges. In many cases, some of the Hack/Meat participants had to listen longer than usual to understand the particulars of meat and its unique challenges.

“This was very different from hackathons I have seen before,” participant Will Turnage told Ars. Turnage is vice president of technology and invention for tech firm R/GA. He's also an organizing member of the Food+Tech meetup. “It threw me for a loop. I was expecting a traditional hackathon. In traditional hackathons, you get there, teams form and work fast. You demo, then you’re done. In this case, we were tackling other people's problems. We spent two days just learning what problems people had. No hacking, no coding. That couldn’t happen until we talked to the sponsor and learned about their issues.”

Turnage was the leader of the winning project team. His group worked with the Vermont Meat Processing Working Group (an organization bringing meat producers and processors together) to focus on challenges with the meat and food system at large. Turnage and his teammates looked specifically at the issues with current tech systems when farmers butcher their animals. The result was CARV, a Web-enabled meat scale that aims to improve the processes and tasks of both farmers and meat processors.

CARV is a “smart scale” that connects to a central database via the Web then produces labels for the cuts of meat. The database can be used to generate reports about meat cutting and processing to help solve inefficiency in the workflow. The scale adds automation to an area that currently doesn’t have much, and it also helps indexing by feeding information into a central database. (You can see CARV and afull list of all the demos and prototypes from Hack//Meat at the Hack//Meat Wiki.)

“As we began to work, we realized a problem was lack of data in digital form,” Turnage said. “Everything that’s happening in this process between farmers and processors was analog. We realized the scale of putting label on there: In order to sell meat to consumer, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) facility has to do it. Farmers can't edit it in any way. The scale, naming cut, lot number, and tracking number—they're printing that now. We said, 'Let's build a scale that logs that data.' That's a simple product but the power of it comes from the APIs and services you could build around that database of information.”

Turnage's team won the top prize: $2,500 and marketing services to help continue their work with the Vermont Meat Processing. Other project topics at the hackathon took different aims: improving communication between producers and consumers, educating about the ethics of meat consumption, or improving processing. But as the teams unveiled their products, an overarching theme became clear. This industry needs to improve transparency and interoperability.

“The biggest obstacle we all have is centralizing the data,” Turnage said. “These projects are valuable if only one database sits in the cloud. Whether we are dealing with a business, a non-profit, an association, we have to figure it out: 'How do we gain the trust of farmers and producers with their data?' They need to trust us and we trust them. That's one of the biggest challenges. One theme of the conference was that the collaborative spirit was needed. Last thing we want to do is be a competitor that has monopoly on data. Doing that doesn't help the problem.“

Though this hackathon turned out to be less “hacky” than the traditional events, Turnage thinks the end result was better than simply pitting engineers and developers against each other like gladiators. They left with plenty of ideas, some common goals, and still a few unanswered questions. For instance, Turnage saw the promise of a meat API is something all those involved can aim for. “APIs could help processors complete the work,” he said. “But if you open up APIs to anyone, you could also help consumers. However, the question of who will manage and have oversight on the data is a crucial question that still needs to be answered.”