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Welcome to The Drip (formerly Water in Food), where we keep your mind hydrated with some science, music, and a mantra. I'm your host, Zachary Cartwright, lead food scientist at AQUALAB by Addium
Hosted by Zachary Cartwright, Ph.D.
Lead FOOD Scientist at AQUALAB
https://www.aqualab.com/
Zachary Cartwright [00:00:04]:
What are the top three purposes of a food safety and management team? Welcome to The Drip, where we keep your mind hydrated with some science, music, and a mantra. I'm your host, Zachary Cartwright, lead food scientist at AQUALAB by Addium in today's episode, we will be discussing food safety and management with Bruce Ferree. In addition to being a former US Marine, a cancer survivor, and a distance runner, Bruce is a food scientist who has worked over 40 years in food manufacturing, quality and food safety management. He's also a very active and involved member with the Institute of Food Technologists and was honored with the IFT Distinguished Service Award in 2015, as well as the IFT Fellow in 2016. Today, he is here to discuss some of the things he learned during his time in the food industry and what he hopes to pass on to the next generation of food scientists. Hi Bruce. Welcome to the show.
Zachary Cartwright [00:01:01]:
Thanks for being here today.
Bruce Ferree [00:01:02]:
It's a pleasure. Zachary. Glad to be here.
Zachary Cartwright [00:01:05]:
Bruce, you have a long history in the world of food science and being in the food industry. Tell us a little bit about your history and your past and what you've done.
Bruce Ferree [00:01:14]:
It's always nice to be recognized for being old. Well, my path in food science started way back in the, the early eighties, the late seventies, believe it or not. I got out of the military and eventually found a passion of food science and ended up going to school at Colorado State University after I graduated. Let's see, I've worked in meats and poultry, further processed meats and poultry, I should say. You know, things like salami and pastrami and oven roasted turkey breast, things like that. I made cheese for 13 years. I worked for a company who indoctrinated everyone that, what do you do for a living? You tell people you make cheese. Well, what's your part of making cheese? Well, my part was managing the laboratory, managing the quality programs.
Bruce Ferree [00:02:06]:
Let's see, I left there, I got into a group that did some consulting, auditing and training, and did that for about four years. That was about 100% travel. We might as well round it off to 100% travel. And so after a few years, kind of burned out, went back to industry, got a job at a company that had two business units. One was converting rice to sugars, whether those are dried sugars or syrups. We did both of them. And the other business was aseptic co packing liquids that you can sterilize, hold sterile, and then build a package around them as you fill the package left there, ended up in meat processing again. Ended up in dairy processing again.
Bruce Ferree [00:02:56]:
Aseptic UHT, extended shelf life products. Interestingly, we could get a six week shelf life on pasteurized milk by doing UHT and then just not using a sterile filler, you still get six weeks of shelf life. And we were able to ship product all the way to Japan and China, and still within the shelf life, still had a month of shelf life left on it. Make. Make a profit on it. So that was good. But I ended my career back in training, auditing, and consulting along food safety and food quality guidelines. So you're right.
Bruce Ferree [00:03:34]:
I've been around the block, been able to work in all 50 states. I've been able to travel to 16 different countries and work. So, yeah, it's been an exciting career, Jeff.
Zachary Cartwright [00:03:45]:
And it sounds like in many of these experiences and products, you've been looking at food safety and food quality. And I'm curious, as somebody who's been in the industry for a while and working at these different companies, how has the culture around food safety and quality changed? What did it look like when you first entered, uh, the industry, and what does it look like now?
Bruce Ferree [00:04:05]:
Excellent question. Perfect question. It has changed. You are correct. It has changed. When I first got into industry, I was in the quality group, and I learned real quick that everybody just wanted to get the product past the inspector. Just get it past the inspector. We get credit for making it, even if we have to rework it, you know, later we'll find out it's bad.
Bruce Ferree [00:04:30]:
So, you know, the quality control group, quality assurance groups were actually the enemy of production. We were the police. You know, somebody saw you coming, and while you were there, things seemed to be going pretty good. But you turn your back and things would change. And through the course of my career, you know, that's from the early eighties to now, the 2020s, now people are more involved. Average workers, I hate to say average worker. The workers, the production team, the warehouse team, the maintenance team, they're all more involved in quality. Quality is part of their job quality and food safety.
Bruce Ferree [00:05:16]:
There's been a lot of training to let people know. You don't just get it past the inspector. The inspector is trying to make sure the customer is happy. So why don't we work together and make the customer happy? So a lot of work has been done to give operational staff not just the responsibility for safety and quality, but also the authority for safety and quality. And to try and explain that, I'll take a. Make a simple example of a production worker realizes that the printed shelf life code on the package is unreadable. And rather than having to find the supervisor, the lead, the foreman, and get the line stopped so it can be fixed, all the while producing product that you can't read the code on, in other words, you can't sell that product. The operator now has the authority to stop the equipment and make the needed changes, make the adjustments, make it readable, stop producing bad product that you're going to have to rework and just produce good product.
Bruce Ferree [00:06:33]:
First pass quality, first time you make it. Did everything pass your quality requirements? First pass quality percentages have gone way up in this timeframe. So yeah, I'm sure that finished product quality, sales quality is also up, but our numbers just didn't reflect that. So it's been quite a transition, and it's a lot more fun now for quality staff to work with manufacturing to help them understand the needs of the customer and the needs of the business in getting product to the customer. It's been very exciting and even in.
Zachary Cartwright [00:07:15]:
My own role, I see this integration. I see a lot more quality teams working closely with production or even with R and D, because really to be successful and to make a consistent, safe, high quality product, you need that collaboration. And so it's reassuring for me as well to hear that you've seen this transition and that we're able to, because of it, jump on and make changes much quicker as they're needed. Because you've worked with so many different safety and management teams, what would you say the top three purpose of a food safety and management team? What are those three purposes?
Bruce Ferree [00:07:51]:
It's always fun to try and integrate food safety and quality. And I took the three letters from CCP, critical control points, which is obviously a safety concern or a safety acronym, and I also turned it into a quality acronym. CCP stands for consistency, continuous improvement and prevention. So not only do we have safety ccps, I like to think of it as quality ccps as well. Consistency, continuous improvement and prevention. I always look at those three. Yeah, back in the eighties, we were just trying to be consistent, always make it the same way, always follow the same process, all those details. And then we started thinking about how do we measure how we're doing? So we started talking about continuous improvement, how do we get better at what we're doing? There was a girl band in the, I'm going to say the eighties might have been the nineties, poor non blondes, and they had, they put out an album.
Bruce Ferree [00:08:59]:
The album title was bigger, better, faster, more. And that kind of became my slogan for continuous improvement. Bigger, better, faster, more. After continuous improvement, came. Why don't we prevent these problems out of continuous improvement is prevention. And the more you think about it, how do we prevent things from going wrong? Prevention is finding what could go wrong and making sure it doesn't. So it kind of came from HACCP prevention, preventive controls. So that's.
Bruce Ferree [00:09:37]:
Those are the three I work on. Consistency, continuous improvement and prevention.
Zachary Cartwright [00:09:42]:
And you touched on it there for a moment. But I'm also curious how your time as a US Marine has helped you as a food scientist and in your career. What else were you able to take from that experience and apply it, uh, to some of these other food safety, food quality things that you've accomplished?
Bruce Ferree [00:09:58]:
I, uh, you know, I never really thought about putting, you know, my background before food into quality management. So I think what you learn from the military is a lot of that consistency. You're regimented. You have to wake up at a certain time. You have to follow a certain process, whether it's just simply saying yes, sir and no, sir to when you march, you always step off on your left foot. I think that regimentedness. Wow, did I just make up another word? Regimentedness. That kind of drives you to consistency.
Bruce Ferree [00:10:40]:
It drives you to continuous improvement. You get a lot of practice when you're in the service. You have to go out and practice marching. You have to go out and practice getting your shirt to look just right. You have to practice sewing on your, your stripes so that they're perfectly straight, all those different things. I think that really played into being more of a success in the quality and food safety business. Of course, you know, you had. There's additional learning.
Bruce Ferree [00:11:11]:
You have to have to, you know, understand pathogens, chemical contamination, process control equipment to operation those type of things. But that regimentedness of the military, and for me, it was the Marine Corps, and I now know four other marines that are in the food industry and members of the IFT. So there's a few of us out there. And I think it did help. Now that you make me think about it, I think it did help.
Zachary Cartwright [00:11:43]:
Well, thank you so much for your service, Bruce. It's always really interesting to me how people's backgrounds push them and help them in their careers. And I have another tough question for you, because if you're open to it, I'm curious how surviving cancer really changed your outlook on life and how you also applied that experience to your career.
Bruce Ferree [00:12:04]:
Thanks. Zachary. You and I obviously go back a ways, and we know each other well enough that, you know, I am a cancer survivor. I think it changes your outlook a little bit. I didn't have a cancer that was like pancreatic cancer, where you don't have much of a chance. It's going to get you quicker, quickly. And I was able to have the offending parts removed, so I got pretty lucky with my cancer battle. And about a year later, all those parts were gone.
Bruce Ferree [00:12:37]:
And, yeah, don't need them anymore. Don't use them anymore. And I think when you're a quality or food safety manager, you have those days where you just think, why am I still doing this? What am I going to do? How am I going to deal with this? This is just so painful. And using the analogy of cancer, there stays the same thought process. Why am I still doing this? But you learn to persevere, and I think surviving cancer, making all those decisions of how we're going to get through this is an analogy for the kind of work we do in food safety and food quality management. You just. You're up against the wall in so many cases of what's next. The rules have changed.
Bruce Ferree [00:13:35]:
The FDA came in today. We're having a recall. The customer doesn't like product x any longer. All those things happen. You kind of take it to heart when you're in the quality business and the food safety business, because that's what you're trying to take care of and address and, if you will, prevent. So I think the perseverance from cancer really played over into perseverance at the job site and at work. I don't know if one led to the other. You know, maybe I had perseverance in my business career, and it just carried over into the cancer battle, or if it was because of the cancer battle, it carried over into the business world.
Bruce Ferree [00:14:23]:
But I think it. That's the bottom line, is that perseverance.
Zachary Cartwright [00:14:27]:
Yeah. Thanks so much for being open to talk about that. And I wanted to move now and talk a little bit about IFT. I know you're very involved there, and in case our listeners don't know what IFT is. What is IFT, and what work have you done with that organization?
Bruce Ferree [00:14:43]:
I'm glad you mentioned that some people might not know what IFT is. It's the Institute of Food Technologists, professional group of food science people who promote the science of food. Whether we're quality geeks or food engineers or nutritionists, those are all some of the areas involved in the science or the sciences of food. So every profession has their own group. You know, you could be a member of the analytical chemists, which is a science group, or you could be a food science chemist. You could be an engineer or a food engineer. So I think what IFT does well is to bring all those disciplines together, as opposed to just focusing on chemistry or microbiology or engineering or nutrition or quality. So it brings all those together.
Bruce Ferree [00:15:48]:
And I joined way back in 1981. And so what is that, 43 years now? And I've done a lot. I've chaired the local geographic area a couple of times. I've served on numerous committees. I've worked at national. I've updated bylaws. I tell people one thing I haven't done is counted money. I haven't been a trigger.
Bruce Ferree [00:16:16]:
I did raise money, I think, over the course of my career, I've raised about $80,000 for student scholarships. One of the things I did was, back in 2016, I participated in, I won't say I finished because I broke my foot, but I participated in a 250 kilometer run across the the chilean desert to raise funds. And we got about 35. Was it 36,500, I think, dollars for student scholarships that year? Yes. I mentioned I broke my foot on day three, so I only got about 75 miles into it before I had to pull out. Disappointing, but fun. Still, you know, the IFT does bring together a lot of good people in the science of food. It's a good organization, and one thing.
Zachary Cartwright [00:17:09]:
You touched on there that I also really appreciate is just all the different types of food scientists this organization brings together. I brought up a list here of the different groups or divisions, and it's everything from aquatic food products, carbohydrates, dairy foods. It could be food microbiology, food safety and quality, where you and I have met and worked together, muscle foods, nutrition, and so on. I think there's now maybe 25 different divisions that I see here. So any scientist or engineer or technologist working in the field of the food industry has a place in a home here. So I like that by my involvement, I get to meet so many different scientists all over the world that participate. But looking forward, how can ift grow? How can it be a better organization? How can you pass on the torch to food scientists like myself or even others in grad school or undergraduates? How can we help this organization be even better in the future?
Bruce Ferree [00:18:11]:
Good question and a tough question. I think all trade associations are having trouble right now. Covid kind of brought a lot of things to the forefront where companies are no longer supporting memberships and trade associations, so members have to pay their own dues. Wouldn't it be nice if dues would be cut by 50% to increase membership. IFT did a lot of things to adjust to the pandemic. And, yes, membership is down at IFT, just like many other trade associations. To be better, I think IFTTT needs to be more proactive in carrying the message of science to the general public. I don't try to think of a great example of carrying the message of science.
Bruce Ferree [00:19:10]:
We could bring in the conversation about GMO's, we could bring in the conversation about organic, and we could bring in the agricultural side of things with the use of, I don't know, pesticides and herbicides. We could talk about the heavy metals issues that is becoming more prevalent in the US. I mean, they've been there forever, and we just haven't recognized it because we weren't able to test for it or we didn't look for it. And now we can find things at parts per trillion. And because it's there, does it mean it's bad? That's the question. And that's where science comes in. That's where toxicologists will tell you the issue really is the amount of this material that you consume, the dose is the poison. And carrying that message of science to the general public, we seem to live in a society that lives on sensational headlines.
Bruce Ferree [00:20:16]:
One study found that this is a problem, but that study had issues. Autism is caused by vaccines. Obviously, that fellow has been discredited and actually, I believe, disbarred as well as a doctor. But that message still is out there, and people still believe it. If you say it often enough, it becomes truth, even though it's not the truth. And I think ift could do a better job carrying the message of science and the science of food to consumers and the general public. I think that's probably the one place I could do a better job at.
Zachary Cartwright [00:21:01]:
And I agree. I think in a world where there's just so much misinformation and so much noise, often we need an organization that leads and talks about food science in this way. And I see IFD doing some things, but I agree that there are things we can do better, and I'm curious to see where this goes in the future. So thank you for bringing up that point. I want to change directions a little. You know, I ask every guest that comes on to this show to give us a music recommendation, and I'm curious what type of music or genre or if you have a specific artist or song that you brought with you today.
Bruce Ferree [00:21:38]:
How exciting. Music, huh? I'm a rock and roller. I can listen to just about anything except for rap music. I still don't understand rap, but I listen to Todd Rundgren a lot, and most people go, who's Todd Rundgren? But he's got a couple of popular songs. There's always one on a Friday afternoon that's good. Right around quitting time. It's called bang on the drum all day and talks about thinking about the drum as your boss and just banging away on the drum to make some more music, get you ready for the weekend, get you all situated for the weekend. Of course, I was the boss.
Bruce Ferree [00:22:21]:
So I don't know if I should like that song anymore or not. But now Todd Rundgren has a lot of good stuff. The album, something, anything is probably one of his better albums. It's from way back in the eighties. Might. It's probably the seventies. Grimy. I'm getting old, aren't I?
Zachary Cartwright [00:22:40]:
And, you know, I also like to ask guests for a mantra or a quote or saying something that you use to motivate yourself or maybe bring some work life balance. What mantra or saying have you brought with you today?
Bruce Ferree [00:22:55]:
I think I already said it. Bigger, better, faster, more. You know, that's so, so consistent with what you were doing in the food business, as well as things you want to do in your regular, regular life. You want to go on bigger vacations. You want to have better vacations. You want to get a bigger house. You, you know, you want it all to happen faster, bigger, better, faster, more. I still love that album, by the way.
Bruce Ferree [00:23:26]:
That's a good album, too. If you want to listen to the four non blondes. That's a nice album.
Zachary Cartwright [00:23:32]:
Well, thank you, Bruce. I appreciate your mantra, your music, and talking a little bit about science and what you've done. You've done a lot in this industry, and I think people like me have a lot to learn from you. So thank you so much for coming on the show today. We appreciate you being here and everything that you fill us in on today.
Bruce Ferree [00:23:50]:
I'm glad I could be here. And like you said, you know, part of our job as we get older is to bring along the next generation. And it's not just telling people what we did. It's helping them envision a better future. How do we do this better? How do we do this faster? How do we make it less complicated, more complicated, easier? All those things. And I'll be here. I'll still be here thinking about those things, even though I'm retired now.
Zachary Cartwright [00:24:20]:
Thanks so much, Bruce. Have a good one.
Bruce Ferree [00:24:22]:
All right, buddy. Take care.
Zachary Cartwright [00:24:26]:
Today's episode is sponsored by AQUALAB. In this episode, we discuss food safety and food quality. Whether you're trying to limit microbial growth, prevent caking and clumping, predict moisture migration, influence chemical and biochemical reactivity, synergize with hurdle technology, or determine shelf life and packaging. Water activity is useful in many aspects of food safety and quality control. To learn more about these applications, click the link on water activity for food safety and quality in the podcast description recently, Christian and I have started experimenting with latin music and tried making a reggaeton song. Here's an unreleased track we've been working on that I played at our last latin night event in Pullman, Washington. The song is called Kimma, and here is the first drop.
Zachary Cartwright [00:25:57]:
And finally, to round out this episode, I will be offering another mantra as a reminder. A mantra is a single syllable, a word, a phrase, something that you can repeat to yourself to feel calm, motivate yourself, or to express something you believe in. This episode's mantra is I am talented and intelligent. I'm going to repeat this three times, and maybe you, the listener, can say this to yourself, or maybe even out loud today. Here we go. I am talented and intelligent. I am talented and intelligent. I am talented and intelligent.
Zachary Cartwright [00:26:40]:
As you keep this mantra in mind, I also challenge you to think about the things that you're brilliant at and take a moment to list your top three professional strengths and assets. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. My name is Zachary Cartwright and this has been another episode of The Drip brought to you by AQUALAB. Stay hydrated and see you next time.
Bruce Ferree [00:27:18]:
Sando Samira Metakimando sara Sandhenne get on, everybody. Don't find.