All these years later, he is still sometimes called "the man who saved Jack in the Box," an echo of a headline the Los Angeles Times placed above a 1994 profile. The article came on the heels of one of the meat industry’s darkest hours, the E. coli crisis that shook the industry to its foundations in the early 1990s, the events that are still often collectively referred to as the "Jack in the Box outbreak."

But Dr. David Theno, who (will retire) at the end of September from "Jack," as he likes to shorten the name, after a long, world-changing career in the meat industry — Theno’s may be the most significant career in the industry of the past 30 years — demurs at the credit he is still given for rescuing a fast-food chain. He had been hired by Jack as a consultant, and says he saw an organization that, while hammered by devastating events, was intently focused on the huge task at hand. "I was so impressed that the worse it got here, the more people clung to these core values of empathy and care and respect for one another and people around us, of integrity and doing the right thing." When company president Bob Nugent offered him the opportunity to join the firm full time to not just remake the firm’s food-safety program but to revolutionize it, Theno barely hesitated to sign up. "I believed if there was ever a bunch of people that could recover this company, it was the people here," Theno commented in the course of a long interview with MEAT&POULTRY. "I don’t know if I was lucky or good in my assessment, but throughout my career I’ve bet on values and people, and I don’t think you can ever go wrong betting on those two things."

The mix of people, values and science is quintessential Theno, and it describes why he has made such a difference in his time. Rather than issue edicts from a corporate office or a sterile laboratory and expect others to carry out their implementation, he took science to the plant floor and engaged workers in the process. He is the person who not only brought the HACCP protocol to the industry’s attention, he’s the one who first made HACCP work in a commercial meat operation. And, later, working with other progressive thinkers in the industry such as Dr. Dell Allen at Cargill, Tim Biela at Texas American, and Dr. James "Bo" Reagan at the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, Theno extended the food-safety mind-set from the packinghouse to the restaurant and retail outlet — the HACCP-driven farm-to-fork food-safety philosophy, which now guides food-safety thinking around the world, is Theno’s greatest legacy.

"I look back on it and hope I’ve helped move the industry along, that I’ve been a good steward of the industry," he says. "I know that many times I’ve taken contentious points of view on things. I’ve done that not to piss people off but to stimulate thinking."

From sausage to cereal

He grew up on farms in Wisconsin and Illinois. His mother was an English teacher, his father was a businessman and also a colonel in the Marine Corps with an active aviator’s commission. "Let’s just say this: we had pretty tight standards at home," Theno remembers. Even so, he had surprising trouble learning to read. "I really kind of fought it," he says. "But my mom came up with about 50 different ingenious ways to get me to read — puzzles, riddles, things I had to solve, crosswords, all kinds of things. Frankly, that’s a big part of whatever success I’ve had — I’m a voracious reader. I probably read, on a standard day, 250-300 pages. That whole foundation for what I’m doing comes from what my mom did for me."

He graduated with a degree in food science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign under the guidance of Dr. Glen Schmidt and Dr. Z.J. Ordall. ("Z". John’s last two graduate students that he had in the Ph.D. program were Russ Flowers, who’s now the president of Silliker Labs, and me. After us I’d retire too.") His first industry experience was at Peter Eckrich & Sons in Fort Wayne, Ind., overseeing the transition of technologies from pilot-plant experiments to plant-volume applications. "They were part of Beatrice back then, but the Eckrich family was still very much involved in the business. They were pretty adamant about the formulations being kept intact — it was a very good company with very good products," he says. "The job I had was a great foundation for being in the industry, because I really, really enjoyed the application of science in the field. I was on-site and solving a lot of quality-assurance and quality-control problems."