Dave Theno: Remembering the Man behind the Headlines
What is the best way to honor someone whose life’s work shaped an entire industry? How do we as an industry ensure his legacy?
As the news of Dave’s death on Monday, June 19, 2017, after he was hit by a large wave while swimming with his grandson off the island of Lana’i in Hawaii, spread throughout the country, disbelief and shock, later replaced by heartbreak, shook an entire industry to its very core.
Whether you knew him at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign or when he was the director of food safety at Foster Farms, it’s likely that you were witness to someone who had an amazing sense of how to connect the dots: how to take a program designed and developed by Pillsbury for NASA’s space program and install it at a meat or poultry production plant. But it goes much further. Here was someone who understood how to inspire and empower people. Line workers at Foster were given the authority to take product off the line if they thought it wasn’t right for any reason. He gave them a reason to care about the work they were doing.
Bob White, president of Foster Farms, embraced Dave’s holistic view of delivering safe, high-quality product to their customers. Dave took the lead and worked with the live production, the technical staff, the processing plants, the sales staff and the U.S. Department of Agriculture Food Safety and Inspection Service (USDA-FSIS) to meet the expectations of consumers and Foster Farms management. When Dave saw the incidence of Salmonella rising on raw product, he quickly moved to develop a plan to characterize the risk. Dave organized a company-wide plan to survey the presence of Salmonella from live production to shipping. Being part of a fully integrated operation, Dave saw the value of working with USDA-FSIS to share the findings and discuss options to reduce Salmonella risk, which included one of the first poultry carcass antibacterial rinse programs back in 1986. Without question, Dave’s vision provided insight into resolving many food safety issues in concert with colleagues across the industry, regulatory agencies and consumer advocacy groups.
Later credited as “the man who saved Jack in the Box,” Dave was brought in as vice president of quality assurance and product safety in March 1993 by Jack in the Box management after the chain’s burgers were blamed for a massive foodborne illness outbreak in the Pacific Northwest. Escherichia coli O157:H7 (in ground beef supplied by Vons) was found to have caused the illnesses, and Dave responded by developing a comprehensive Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) plan for the chain, as well as a finished product testing protocol that initially irked his former meat industry colleagues.
But Theno’s lasting contribution to the meat industry was not only his leadership in responding to the E. coli O157:H7 outbreak. He was also instrumental in demonstrating how the scientific community and the meat industry can work together to solve food safety challenges, seeing HACCP adopted by USDA in 1996 as the safety basis for the entire federal meat inspection program. But maybe even more impactful than these tremendous achievements were his oft-repeated mantras that would remind the entire food industry why food safety matters (and should make obvious why he was the inaugural guest on our new podcast of the same name): The U.S. food supply might be the safest in the world, “but it’s never safe enough,” and when giving a presentation post-Jack in the Box outbreak, he always talked about how he carried the photo of one of the little girls who died from eating an E. coli-contaminated hamburger at Jack in the Box, saying, “That’s who we work for. She was our customer.”
How will you keep Dave’s legacy alive in your day-to-day work? Will you give purpose to line workers, providing ownership to them in the importance of their work? Will you tell them that they have the authority to make decisions that have lifesaving consequences? Will you ask yourself, when making food safety decisions, whether you would feed the product your company makes to your own kid? If you wouldn’t, Dave would say, then don’t send it out. It really is that simple. But it takes a desire to do the right thing all the time. Without exception.
The words that follow are from Dave’s colleagues around the industry, written while still trying to wrap their heads and hearts around such a tremendous loss.
We have lost a good friend and advocate for doing things right.
—John Butts, Ph.D.