Dr. Jonathan Frey’s is currently holding a position of Data Science Consultant. He is recently retired from his position as Director of Operations Intelligence at Taco Bell Corporation where he served for 15 years as data scientist for Operations, Finance, IT, R&D and HR related projects. Prior to joining Taco Bell, Jonathan served as a Product Development Manager at Mars for 13 years and at Kraft, Inc. as a Research Scientist for 4 years. He holds a BS in Bacteriology and a Ph.D. in Food Microbiology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Jonathan’s Ph.D. research was The Proteases and Peptidases of Dairy Lactobacilli and Barley Malt. While at Kraft headquarters in Glenview, he was responsible for scaling up his Ph.D. thesis; Lactobacillus based peptidase cheese ripening enzymes into Cheddar and Parmesan cheese on an industrial scale. He was the project leader for scaling up a proprietary natural Cheddar cheese process that used ultrafiltration and evaporation technologies in a research semi-works facility in Kentucky. Concurrently, he led a multidisciplinary team on Cheddar Cheese flavor development.

He was hired by Mars to leverage the enzyme based flavor process with pet food flavors. Due to the complexity of the projects and the necessity to derive insights from animal acceptance testing, he relied heavily on experimental design (d-optimal) and data mining to interpret test results. Data from animal acceptance tests from North America, Europe, South America and Australia research centers were codified and a global research data warehouse was constructed to be used to data mining. Chemical, manufacturing, product formulations, nutrient compositions, animal physiological and environmental data were included in the data warehouse. Decision trees, non-linear regression, k-means clustering, Principle Components and many other techniques were used to interpret the data and development new flavors. Software used was Angoss KnowledgeStudio, MegaPuter PolyAnalyst, Statistica, Spotfire, experimental design/optimization (HITS) and machine learning tools from Carnegie Mellon University.

He was a technical brand manager for WHISKAS, PEDIGREE and WALTHAM diets with extensive manufacturing and scale-up responsibilities in the U.S. and internationally. He has extensive experience in cost optimization of product formulations.

His extensive data mining and experience with experimental design and data mining led to his position at Taco Bell Corporation. His initial responsibilities were to establish a state of the art taste panel and product development process using experimental design and data mining. Every new product since January 2001 utilizes this process for product development. After establishing the taste panel and product development procedures, more of my time was utilized for broader data mining projects in the business. His data mining skills were leveraged by R&D, QA, Human Resources, Legal, IT, Marketing, Operations and Finance primarily at Taco Bell, but also at Long John Silvers, Pizza Hut and KFC.

In 2009 he became the Director of Operations Intelligence with full time data mining responsibilities for Operations and the rest of the organization. His main projects include labor optimization, restaurant transaction forecasting, establishment of yearly bonus targets as a function of operational metrics, cash register fraud detection systems, drivers of sales/transaction growth and data/text mining of numerous surveys. His responsibilities were to also data/text mine Voice of the Customer, Complaint Hotline, Restaurant Calibration and other large databases within the organization for key insights.

Since 2014 he have been charged with data and text mining the Operational Call Center data which serves the needs of Restaurant IT issues. Using MegaPuter PolyAnalyst he have built a state of the art text mining solution to read service desk analyst notes and deliver precise interpretation of the root cause of call traffic. This system has been instrumental in delivering a dramatic reduction in time to answer and greater deployment of resources within the call center.

Bacteriology; Food Microbiology.