�鶹APP

Right around the time Harry Hou (M.S. FST ’08) arrived in �鶹APP to study food science and safety, he got some real-world reinforcement as to why he’d chosen an important career.

There was a large outbreak of E. coli in spinach in the United States. At the same time, in his home country of China, there was a huge scandal involving adulteration—or making a product worse by adding a substance of inferior quality—in infant milk formula that led to kidney damage. The same type of chemicals involved in the infant milk formula scandal were found, in the same timeframe, in adulterated pet food from China, leading to a recall.

“That hit me hard. It was part of my pride and where I came from. I was very embarrassed,” Hou says. But those outbreaks only motivated him to improve global food safety even more.

“What I’m doing is to protect U.S. consumers, which I’m actually pretty proud of, and promoting more people eating healthier foods.”

After Hou graduated from Illinois Institute of Technology and went on to get a Ph.D. in the same field from the University of Minnesota, he started working at Kraft Foods. There, he traveled across the world doing quality assurance for the company’s food producers and packagers.

“In our field, you have to be hands-on. You have to physically go there. In general, each country is a little different in terms of regulations,” Hou says. “The regular population, they don’t realize food is a very complicated commodity to manage. There are broad instructions for food standards.”

“The most common issue is related to people. We say, ‘people, program, process,’ and all are important. But you can have the best program, and it’s a piece of paper. You have to engage people to make it happen,” he adds.

Beyond improving processes, a quality assurance officer also needs to be on the lookout for rare instances of “food fraud.”

“Sometimes you get into a situation where, for example, you want a strawberry to be more sweet. In some parts of the world, people actually inject sugar to make it more sweet. It’s a problem,” Hou says.

After traveling the globe for Kraft, and later Mars Wrigley Confectionery, Hou took a job as director of food safety for a smaller �鶹APP-area startup, Farmer’s Fridge, which produced fresh salads to sell in vending machines.

Then, in 2022, he was offered a job at his current company, Fresh Express, which also manufactures packaged salads for retail locations such as supermarkets.

The job came with a major perk: as director of food safety and innovation, not only is he in charge of making improvements in food safety programs, but he has also been given lab facilities to study new food safety technologies to apply to the industry. Right now, he’s developing more advanced sanitizing methods for produce packaging facilities, a fast-detection method for food-born pathogens, and is utilizing artificial intelligence and machine learning to leverage historical data to figure out where potential risks
are introduced in the company’s packaging processes.

“It’s stressful, but fun,” Hou says. “I was always passionate about food. Sharing meals is a big thing in China, and sometimes a big cultural event. It’s a memory of family and friends. I would enjoy that.

“Now, my kids actually eat the salads for my company I work at. It boosts my energy to keep working hard.” 

-Tad Vezner