PORTLAND — Northwest food processors are taking steps to protect workers amid the COVID-19 crisis while also keeping up production to meet shifting consumer demands.

It is a unique challenge for agricultural businesses deemed essential to the public, where many employees are unable to work from home and social distancing is not always easy inside bustling round-the-clock facilities that make everything from soup to french fries.

“For some of us, working side-by-side is part of the job,” said Mike Meredith, senior vice president of Continental Mills and board chairman of Food Northwest, formerly the Northwest Food Processors Association. “Some of our employees had to make that choice.”

Continental Mills is headquartered in Tukwila, Wash., a suburb of Seattle, and operates a processing plant in Kent, about 10 miles south along Interstate 5, making pie crust and pancake mix under the brand name Krusteaz.

Food Northwest, a trade group based in Portland, represents about 65 direct processors in Oregon, Washington and Idaho, as well as 300 associate businesses including cold storage plants and packaging manufacturers.

As the number of positive COVID-19 cases has surged well into the thousands across the region, Meredith said the industry has rapidly implemented a series of emergency measures to promote social distancing and increase sanitation to prevent transmitting the disease.

The six-page guidelines, last updated on March 26, recommend staggering shift changes, minimizing close contact between workers where possible, increasing ventilation and washing hands more frequently, among other practices.

However, the rules state that, unless required by authorities, “physical (social) distancing should be a tool but not a requirement in facilities needed to operate at capacity.”

Isaak Stapleton, director of food safety for the Oregon Department of Agriculture, said the agency worked with Food Northwest to help develop the measures. Oregon has approximately 2,926 licensed food processors, according to ODA.

“A lot of it is just common sense stuff,” Stapleton said. “It’s the little things that make a really big impact.”

At Continental Mills, Meredith said corporate employees are working from home while plant workers will receive emergency pay as an incentive for them to stay home if they feel sick.

“Some people have made the choice that being home is better for them, and we’ll support them,” Meredith said.

Continental Mills employs about 800 people total, including production sites in Kentucky, Illinois and Kansas. Between labor and supply chain demand, Meredith said production has been squeezed 20-30%, but they are finding creative ways to fill the gaps.

“The core staples, such as pancake mix, have been flying off of store shelves,” he said. “We’ve been trying to keep up with exploding demand, while balancing the health and safety of our employees.

Josh Jordan, spokesman for the J.R. Simplot Co., said it is closing down facilities as necessary — including its corporate headquarters in downtown Boise, Idaho — while also staggering shift changes, promoting social distancing and testing employees’ temperatures at all food processing and distribution centers.

“Many of our production facilities are highly automated and do allow us to maintain the distance recommendations,” Jordan said in an email. “There are common areas, such as break rooms or entrance areas, where we’re staggering our employees’ use of the space to ensure minimum numbers at any given time, and we’ve heightened our cleaning in all areas as well.”

J.R. Simplot is a multinational food and agriculture company with more than 12,000 employees worldwide, and a member of Food Northwest. Simplot Foods processes a variety of fruits and vegetables, distributed to more than 100 different countries.

Both federal and state governments have identified agriculture as an essential industry during the coronavirus outbreak. Stapleton, the director of food safety at ODA, said food supplies remain strong despite images of empty grocery store shelves.

“Processors are continuing to produce food,” he said. “There’s not a shortage of food.”

Scott DuHadway, the Cameron Professor of supply chain management at Portland State University, said stores typically only keep enough inventory of certain nonperishable products, like beans, pasta and toilet paper, to serve immediate needs. Supply chains prioritize efficiency in their system, rather than flexibility, he explained.

The pandemic has disrupted normal demand patterns as concerned consumers buy and hoard in greater bulk, DuHadway said. It has taken some time for supply chains to catch up, though he said the good news now is that more product is coming.

“Everyone is producing at the capacity they can, and increasing capacity,” DuHadway said.

On the supply side, DuHadway said supply chains typically value things like speed and innovation, though that has almost entirely shifted to health and safety. Companies that focus on health and safety will have the best chance of recovering post-pandemic, he said.

“In risk management, the priority is to minimize the damage to your assets during a disruption,” DuHadway said. “The thing that’s under attack right now is humans, so protecting humans should be the key priority for anyone who’s trying to manage risk.”