Your food’s safety - and your pet’s - is Tim Ahn’s business

Tim Ahn walked into the Captain Morgan rum distillery in St. Croix. Even though it was five o’clock somewhere, Ahn wasn’t on island time; he was there on business.

Ahn is a food quality assurance professional, and he was there to make sure the rum was up to snuff. He is also one of the world’s leading chocolate experts.

“I would do Bring Your Parent to Work Days at school and I was a trained chocolate taster. The teachers would come up to me after and say, ‘How do you get that job?’” Ahn said.

But, Ahn is not a full-time food taster. In fact, he rarely tries the products on site. 

“When you’re an auditor, you have to be independent,” he said. “I’m checking the controls they use to make the product, checking records, looking at ingredients, granting certifications and giving them ideas on how to make things better,” he said.

Ahn and his wife Sandy have lived in Lewes for 15 years. He grew up in New Castle County and graduated from Archmere Academy.

Ahn earned a degree in chemical engineering from the University of Delaware.

“When I graduated, other kids were going to DuPont, but I applied for a job [as a process engineer] at General Foods in Dover, which is now Kraft. I was working on chocolate and Minute Rice,” he said.

Ahn then went to work for Mars, maker of M&M’s, Wrigley chewing gum and Uncle Ben’s rice, in Texas.

He hopscotched all over the country for various positions in his 27 years at Mars, including Las Vegas, New Jersey and two factories in Pennsylvania.

“I stayed in chocolate. I ran quality assurance at the chocolate factory in Elizabethtown, Pa., then for North America, and eventually I was the global head of food safety for Mars, for chocolate,” Ahn said. “Every messed-up thing – product nonconformance, recall, regulatory things – I was in the middle of solving.”

Ahn said he became a chocolate expert at the Elizabethtown plant, learning all the ins and outs of cocoa beans and cocoa bean processing.

He said it is no coincidence that Mars’ factory was a stone’s throw from Hershey.

“There were a number of chocolate companies in that area. They had access to beans coming into the Port of Philadelphia. There was a big supply of milk, and it became a really big chocolate area, “ Ahn said.

Ahn is now working as a consultant, using his expertise to make chocolate safer from farm to factory. He works with cocoa growers in Africa, South America and the Caribbean – all where most of the world’s chocolate comes from – and with processors to lower levels of potentially dangerous chemicals. 

“Chocolate, especially dark chocolate which has the highest percentage of cocoa, has higher levels of heavy metals versus other food products, particularly lead and cadmium,” he said. “There are 2 million farmers, so impacting change is difficult, but when beans come to the U.S., we can get all the loose stuff off them, and that will reduce the lead level.”

But, Ahn said, go ahead and eat those chocolate Easter bunnies.

“It’s not a safety issue because you’d have to eat 25 pounds a week forever to have any kind of impact,” he said.

He recently talked about his work on a BBC podcast called “Sliced Bread,” that looks at a product and asks, “Is it marketing or the best thing since sliced bread?”

“I said absolutely [chocolate] is the best thing since sliced bread, just don’t eat so much,” he said.

Ahn said the chocolate found in candy bars at the supermarket is just as safe as high-end products from specialty stores. He said the formulas might be different, but the beans all come from the same place.

He said his personal favorites are Dove dark chocolate and Cadbury dairy milk chocolate.

Ahn said a big part of his business is making sure food for dogs and cats is just as safe as people food. He said half of Mars’ business is pet food.

“People don’t understand the complexity around pet food. It is the single source of nutrition for an animal. A lot of things have to be right for it to work, like the right amount of nutrients and vitamins, so they don’t get too much of one and not enough of another,” he said. “That was the biggest thing that surprised me, how much effort goes into pet food to make sure it’s safe.”

Pets are part of Ahn’s life in another way. He is a volunteer at Humane Animal Partners’ Midway Adoption Center. He walks rescue dogs, takes dogs to HAP adoption events, washes soiled blankets and even dresses up as Clifford the Big Red Dog for local parades, like Sea Witch.

“Sandy and I have traveled so much and lived in a bunch of different areas. We felt that wherever we lived, we wanted to be active participants. Volunteering is something we’ve always done,” Ahn said. “I really like dogs and just started picking up activities to do. You get the fever once you’re over there.”

Sandy volunteers at the Lewes Public Library.

Ahn said his travels will take him to a diverse cross section of the food industry.

“Next month, I’m going to a company that makes food-grade oils and lubricants in Buffalo. I was just at a pet food plant in South Carolina. I’ve got a couple of winery audits coming up and, an interesting one, I’m auditing a pet food operation in the south of France,” he said.

He said the people he works with often really appreciate his efforts, including the owner of a woman-owned farm in Ivory Coast.

“The interpreter said the farmer was really impressed with you, happy to work with you, they really want to make a big difference, and they want to give you a gift. The gift was a live chicken. I didn’t want to say no, but they took it and put it in the back of a truck. I didn’t even think to ask what they did with it,” he said. “It’s crazy stuff like that you run into and makes it just so much fun,” he said.

Ahn is also working to make a difference.

“You don’t realize how diverse the food industry is, how many different places are making stuff you see every day. You go to the grocery store and see some of the products you’ve actually seen being manufactured, and you made sure they were good to go,” he said.