Howdy, my name is Mian Riaz and I am an Associate Department Head in the Department of Food Sciences As well as Associate Professor in the Department of Food Science and Technology Food science is a discipline which basically takes a raw material from post-harvest all the way to the packaging. It includes your chemistry, your physics, applied sciences, packaging, and generating all aspects of the food. My main focus is food processing. I do a lot of snack food processing. Most of the food compan
ies and snack food companies also whenever you make extruded snacks they also have some kind of tortilla chips line, and that led us to this short course training program. So we'll be doing our 27th short course on tortilla chips. Corn is the basic food for most of the people who live in Mexico, and since we are right here close to the border, here we have a lot of Spanish population and people like that one. That's why it's very important culturally that we make a good quality tortilla which fu
lfills their need and their taste. We've been doing these courses for the last 26 years and the way it works, a lot of people from all over the world will come here. Therefore, we do lots of activity in the classroom lectures, and then also demonstration here in the power plant. Usually on each course we have an average 15 to 20 different countries representing us in this course. Most of the companies who comes here, basically they are in the snack food business and I can give you some examples.
We have Frito-Lay, we have Kellogg's, we have -H-E-B, Kroger, and some other major companies even Nestle, Nabisco, General Mills, all that food companies are who are in this business, snack food business, plus tortilla business. They come and attend these courses. Therefore, every company who hires a new person, they wait for the course and they come and attend that one. Well, you know, if you go to the food industry, everywhere I go, I can see that most of the Aggies are working there and when
I see their product, this is an Aggies product. This is this one product, therefore, it always makes us feel happy that Aggies are changing, making the difference. They are going all over the world. I've been here for 30 years and I see a lot of students, a lot of people here are working and changing that concept, the old concept, the new food industries and they're making and developing new products. They are doing something, therefore, it's amazing to see all our Aggies who have gone into dif
ferent industries and are making a difference in the world and we are proud of those who are working in the food industry.
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