Founder & President of Women in Food Safety: Career Insights with Melody Yu | That’s a Food Job! #133
About Melody Yu
Melody Yu has built a career out of almost every food safety job there is. She’s a Six Sigma Black Belt (a certification for spotting and fixing problems in a process), a PCQI Lead Instructor (someone trained to teach food companies how to prevent contamination before it happens), and an SQF Trainer (SQF is one of the main certifications grocery stores and manufacturers require their suppliers to have).
Melody is also the President and Founder of Women in Food Safety (WIFS), a nonprofit that helps the next generation of women build careers in food safety.
She earned her B.S. and M.S. in Food Science and Engineering from the University of Maryland, then went on to work almost every job you could imagine in this space. She did R&D (researching and developing new products) at Beyond Meat, worked in compliance (making sure companies follow food safety rules) at SQFI, handled quality assurance (checking that products consistently meet safety and quality standards) at Lidl US, and led food safety teams at StarKist and TreeHouse Foods.
She ran WIFS as a side project for years while working full-time. Now she’s made the leap to run it as her main job, alongside her own food safety consulting business.
What We Cover in This Episode
This is Melody’s second time on the show, and a lot has changed since her first visit. She and Veronica talk about how she knew it was time to leave a stable corporate job and go all in on Women in Food Safety, plus the two questions she asks herself whenever she’s deciding whether to stay in a role or move on.
They also get into what “middle management” actually looks like in food safety, and why it can take five to ten years to move from a manager role into a director or VP role. Melody shares how WIFS supports students through mentorship, virtual events, and two brand-new international chapters, and exactly how you can get plugged into the community yourself.
Watch the Episode Below
Links
Timestamps
- 00:00 – Nothing You Do Is Wasted
- 00:28 – Welcome Back, Melody
- 01:26 – Life Since Round One
- 03:38 – Going All In on WIFS
- 04:22 – Mapping a Food Safety Career
- 05:20 – Starting in R&D
- 07:45 – Learning the SQF Code
- 10:08 – Visa Limbo and Consulting Years
- 13:01 – Find What You Like
- 13:39 – Opportunities for Today’s Students
- 14:38 – Stay or Go? Her Checklist
- 17:42 – Fitting In vs. Belonging
- 19:00 – Certifications Worth Getting
- 20:04 – Try Everything While You’re Young
- 22:35 – Why She Founded WIFS
- 23:17 – The Food Science Club Moment
- 25:34 – Bridging Academia and Industry
- 27:39 – Two New Global Chapters
- 29:44 – How Members Find Solutions Together
- 32:20 – 1,700 Members and Counting
- 35:33 – What “Middle Management” Really Means
- 37:29 – What’s Next for WIFS
- 39:52 – How Students Can Get Involved
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