Anthony Mario Valdovino

Tyson’s chef de cuisine

SELF PORTRAITDate and place of birth: Dec.

23, 1974, Modesto, Calif.

What I loved about growing up in California was the “California Dreamin’” image, fruits and vegetables during the seasons, the beach being so close and San Francisco in our backyard.

The most interesting thing I’ve learned about wines is everyone tastes something different. Wine is an accompaniment to life experiences - where you are and who you’re with.

I would describe the style of my home kitchen as a work in progress to become the perfect test kitchen.

One tip I would give to any chef is invest in a great pair of shoes and a good mattress.

My favorite restored car was: 1968 Chevrolet Chevelle.

When I’m on a plane, I like to play Tetris and catch up on my podcast.

In ÿ ve years, I hope to see a decreased percentage of Americans in poverty and more ÿghting against hunger.

My favorite food ethnicity is regional Italian cuisine.

Something people would be surprised to learn about me is I like everyday food just as much as anybody else. That includes chicken sandwiches and mac ’n’ cheese … though they both need to be enhanced with thick-cut bacon.

A word to sum me up: inventiveMario Valdovino is working on something big.

He’s working on several big things, actually. If all goes well, they’ll turn out to be huge things.

Valdovino is the corporate executive chef and director of culinary innovation, research and development at Tyson Foods, Inc. There, in 19 kitchens throughout the company’s Springdale-based Discovery Center, he leads a nine-member team.

Four of his team members are chefs, and together they work on creating the next food sensation - whether it’s something consumers flock to restaurants to buy en masse, or something so popular that grocery stores have trouble keeping it on their shelves.

If it’s going to be a hit, it’s got to be delicious, but it’s also got to be commercially viable.

“You have food scientists and then you have the culinary component,” explains David Jetter of West Fork, a culinary and training manager with Tyson Food Service Distribution. “You’re really diving into flavors and textures, all those nuances of products that you don’t find in straight food science.

“Mario is the one who bridges that gap, because he has knowledge of food science, but he’s also this incredible chef who’s really well-versed in the culinary arts.”

It’s quite possible that not a single person in the country holds a position identical to Valdovino’s job with Tyson. What makes his position unique is that, technically speaking, noneof the chefs he manages work for his company.

They’re embedded research chefs - part of the Tyson Strategic Supply Partnership - and they work with the science and food technology team within Tyson’s research and development division. Their job includes brainstorming, concept development, creation of sample products for preliminary evaluation, and working as flavor and form consultants on new products.

Because of this, it’s wholly possible for Valdovino to work on developing products for different food companies on the same day, planning and cooking in kitchens just a few feet apart. The author of Chef Formulation and Integration: Ensuring That Great Food and Food Science Work Together, he’s fully committed to the development of new food products using consumer insights.

One of the embedded research chefs is Luke Hennigan of Fayetteville, who works for Chicago-based Newly Weds Foods. Kerry Group, a direct competitor of Newly Weds Foods, also has an embedded research chef on Valdovino’s team, and sometimes they pair up to work on Tyson projects like catering and upscale lunches for executives. Many times they are working on products that may go head-to-head in the marketplace.

It’s never a tense situation, Hennigan says, not between the embedded chefs from different companies and definitely not between the Tyson employees and the people who spend their days in Tyson headquarters, but technically work forsomeone else.

That’s a credit to Valdovino, who combines a brilliant mind for food with an engaging personality. He’s pumped about his work for Tyson, his hobbies and his local charity involvement.

“He’s awesome to work for, definitely the best boss I’ve ever had,” Hennigan says. “He’s so articulate and so passionate about what he does. He sticks up for us and fights for us on things, and is just an all-around great person.

“He’s very, very smart, and is great to learn from, because he’s got a ridiculous amount of information.” SEEING A PATH

Valdovino, 38, would have made a great ophthalmologist.

That was his career goal when he was a kid in California, to go to medical school and become an eye doctor.

The last thing he wanted to do, he says, was go into food. He had relatives who were in the food business and he was certain it wasn’t for him.

“I vowed to myself that I was not going to be in the restaurant business, that I was going to get my education and be the best eye doctor possible,” Valdovino says. “My mom was a single mom who worked two jobs, and she had this incredible work ethic. She would push and guide her kids, to make sure we were set for the world.”

Valdovino grew up in Northern California. He excelled in school and was student-body president for two years of high school. He hasalways had a strong mind for science, which would have served him well as a doctor but has proved equally valuable to his career in food.

Valdovino loves the science behind what he does at Tyson - the ingredients and the processes that go into products. He calls this “culinology,” where culinary art meets technology, and the mere mention of it causes him to be even more animated than usual.

Consider the humble chicken sandwich. Tyson supplies the meat, someone else provides the breading, a third party supplies the flavorings, and it’s up to Valdovino and his team to put it all together, to come up with something that’s delicious and viable and can be consistently produced thousands of times over.

This requires the ability to know lots of little details and to be able to work seamlessly with people throughout the Tyson organization and its collaborative partners.

“He’s communicating with so many different business units, so his team needs to know he’s approachable, and he needs to be engaged,” says Alicia Mosley of Rogers, a senior brand manager with Tyson. “He’s so collaborative, such an on-trend person. He’s a visionary, [knowing] where we need to go next and how we get there. Mario would rival any other food company’s executive chef.”

Valdovino earned his bachelor’s degree in biology from the University of California, but by the time he finishedcollege he was certain that food was his calling.

It started innocently enough. As a teenager, Valdovino got a job in high-volume catering. “Grunt work,” he calls it.

He liked it well enough, about as much as he enjoyed his previous job “slinging shoes,” and would enjoy his next job, “slinging pizzas.”

As time passed, though, and in particular after he made the move to Southern California for college, Valdovino kept getting drawn to food. At some point, food stopped being a series of jobs and turned into a lifelong passion.

These days, Valdovino has some “serious” hobbies. He rebuilds classic cars - most recently “Ruby Rose,” a 1967 Ford Ranger long-bed pickup that he then sold - and he’s an aspiring sommelier who has been making a rigorous study of wines over the past couple of years.

But he makes no bones about it: Food is his life. Whether it’s artisan cocktails, handcrafted cheese, or trying to create the next new flavor for Tyson, he’s all in.

“Mario is what we call a classic foodie,” Mosley says. “He’s got the consummate professional understandingof the role food plays in our lives, whether it be social or functional, and how all the trends play into what Tyson needs.

“He’s truly a craftsman.” THE SCIENCE OF IT

The pressure wasn’t in the kitchens; it was in trying to find a kitchen where he could work.

Following college graduation, Valdovino enrolled in a San Francisco culinary school, and as he approached the end of it, he worried about trying to land that first job. He had already amassed plenty of fine-dining experience - most notably in a restaurant owned by some of the stars of TV’s Beverly Hills, 90210, - but there were 50-plus students in his graduating class, all released into the job market at once, and they needed to take whatever work they could get.

For Valdovino, that was a graveyard-shift position in quality assurance for Mallard’s Food Products in Modesto, Calif.

After getting his foot in the door, Valdovino was quickly moved out of the lab and onto Mallard’s culinary team. The team worked on home-meal replacements, creating meal kits that combined thingslike ready-to-cook pasta, vacuum-packed seasoned meat and Mallard’s signature sauces in a single package. In short order, those meal-replacement kits were a hit in California grocery stores.

It was a great education for Valdovino. He worked with chefs, butchers, scientists, marketers, label-makers - anyone who was involved with any step of the process. By learning the business side, he developed appreciation of how food manufacturers can help their business partners grow, which ultimately benefits both parties.

“The interesting part of Mario is that he understands marketing, and because in a past life he worked in really nice restaurants, he’s got the perspective of what business owners really need,” Jetter says. “He can bridge that gap of what you’re asking for from a culinary and marketing perspective, and he knows what’s going to help grow that business and make more money.”

Tyson bought Mallard’s in 1997. Valdovino stayed in California at first, then went to Chicago in 1999 to work as a research chef for another one of Tyson’s companies, Culinary Foods Inc. In Chicago, he worked on developing a microwaveable line of frozenentrees in plastic bowls for Uncle Ben’s, as well as airline meals and private-label entrees.

In 2004, Valdovino left Tyson. His family needed him.

COMING BACK

It wasn’t extremely difficult for Valdovino to leave Tyson.

“I tried very hard to stay in Chicago, to make it work,” he says. “I had to make a hard decision.”

His mother and his sister were having health problems, so Valdovino decided to return to California to assist them. He got a job as a vice president of a small company, Fiore Di Pasta, and worked on business development and innovation.

He worked at Fiore Di Pasta for nearly two years, all the while monitoring the developments going on in Springdale. Tyson was near completion of its mammoth Discovery Center.

About a year after he returned to California, Valdovino started getting calls from Tyson. This new building was going to be state of the art, he was told, a place where tomorrow’s foods could be created, and he needed to be a part of it on the ground level.

Valdovino politely dismissed them at first, insisting he was happy in California and with Fiore, but his old company was persistent. Valdovino agreed to fly to Springdale to check out the then-unfinished building, and was blown away by what he saw.

“They said, ‘You’ve got this great history with Tyson, we have a tremendous amount of resources, come look at what’s taking place,’” Valdovino recalls. “Talk about a carrot dangled in front of you; this was a solid gold carrot. This was a chef’s dream.”

Valdovino returned to Tyson in July 2006, accepting a position as director of culinary services. He gave input on the design of the 17 test kitchens and two demonstration kitchens in the Discovery Center, working with the engineering teams on layouts and installing equipment.

That was wonderful, Valdovino says. What was so not wonderful were the economic struggles facing Tyson.

When Valdovino rejoined Tyson, he was told he would have three Tyson chefs. Shortly after arriving, he was told that the company would be unable to fill those positions.

He wondered how he was ever going to get anything accomplished by himself. Late one night, while stressing out about the situation, he saw something on TV about Dan Coudreaut, the executive chef at McDonald’s, and it sparked an idea: what if Tyson had embedded research chefs, with Valdovino as their manager?

And so, Tyson began having embedded chefs.

“This was never the plan,” Valdovino says. “When the rug gets pulled out from you, what do you do? You’ve got to be resilient.”

The plan could not have worked out better for Valdovino. He was promoted to his current position last year, and has done some “incredibly cool” things since returning to the company. He has appeared as a guest judge on the TV show Chopped. He worked with the U.S. Olympic Committee and its chefs during the 2008 Olympic Games, teaming up to create nutritious recipes for American Olympians and their families.

And he has found a home in Northwest Arkansas. He has gotten involved with nonprofits throughout the region - it takes little prompting for him to gush about the menu he has planned for the Big Night fundraiser for the Jones Center on Nov. 9 - and he’s excited about the region’s burgeoning culinary scene.

He was invited to cook for Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in June during the week of events surrounding annual Ladies Professional Golf Association tournament in Rogers. That was a blast, he says, but not as much fun as he has daily at the nation’s largest meat producer.

“This is awesome! Whether I’m working on a meatball that goes into a canned soup, a dumpling meal, an all-natural chicken for a specific customer, re-creating the next craveable Korean-food-truck-inspired chicken, we’re doing all of that in this great building,” he says. “We have a national platform.”

Northwest Profile, Pages 37 on 10/13/2013

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