I just finished watching Top Gun Maverik for the second time. As I left the theater, and my eyes adjusted to the bright sun, I realized that military fighter pilots and most food company CEO’s have one significant thing in common: a need for speed. While Maverick found himself streaking across the skies at Mach 10 (or, 7,672.691 miles per hour), many food companies find themselves attempting to meet customer demand by producing their food products at near lighting speed.

As I thought more about the film, it also struck me that Maverick’s exploits in Top Gun reflect the epitome of what we should not be doing in the food industry. Maverick has consistently demonstrated, first in 1986 while flying F-14 Tomcats, and more recently in 2022 flying the Navy’s Darkstar hypersonic aircraft (and the slower but still wildly fast F-18 Hornet), that he has an insatiable habit of pushing the limits as far as the limits can be pushed.

While piloting the Darkstar, Maverick’s mission was to coax the futuristic aircraft to Mach 10, and no further. Having achieved his mark, after some teeth grinding and cursing, Maverick found himself coasting along at speeds which could take him from New York to London in only 30 minutes. But, that wasn’t fast enough. Not able to resist his need for speed, Maverick then began to edge the nose of the hypersonic plane just slightly toward the earth, and began a descent that took him to Mach 10.4 before the lights went out and the aircraft exploded into a massive cloud of fire and debris.

The lesson here is that every system has its limits. No matter how good the people are running it, if you push any system too far, it will fail. And, the same rules which apply to hypersonic aircraft also apply to food processing lines and equipment. If those lines and equipment are run too hard for too long, there will be a point at which they are no longer able to perform as designed.

The same can be said for the infrastructure support for those lines. If the lines are run too hard, the support infrastructure will begin to lag behind. This includes infrastructure such as daily cleaning and sanitation, the performance of change-over controls, the elimination of resident strains of bacteria, and the exercise of hygienic practices. And, when failures do occur, it may not be as simple as running a bit too hard on a single day. Rather, the cumulative effect of stressors over long periods of time often are the cause of a system eventually reaching its breaking point. Put differently, what we might get away with by running hard on only Monday, we most likely will not get away with by running hard on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.

While meeting customer orders and demand is always critically important, it is also always acceptable (and, in most cases, highly advisable), to have the courage to say that “our system is simply not designed to meet the demand.” Either we give a little on the volumes, or we could give a whole lot more on a catastrophic failure.

So, what’s the lesson? It’s okay to run a little slower, produce a safer (and, frankly, higher quality) product, and still make lots of money. Just remember, when you turn on the lights in the morning and get ready to ramp up production, you don’t have to be a Top Gun to make a Top Bun.

Top bun

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