Mohammad Aljaar graduated from the University of Jordan in 2023 with a degree in food science and technology. Most of his peers went into labs or nutrition consultancy. He looked at the food industry’s quality problem and decided to go somewhere else entirely.
Within months of graduating, he had a diploma in occupational safety and health from the Jordanian Ministry of Labor. Then ISO 22000. Then ISO 9001, ISO 45001, ISO 14001, and Halal certification. Then EFQM Assessor status. He was not collecting certificates to fill a CV. He was building a map of every place food systems can fail — and learning how to fix them.
What most people miss about food quality
The average consumer thinks food safety is about cleanliness. It is not, or at least not primarily. The bigger failures happen upstream — in supplier verification, documentation gaps, production line design, and the way teams respond when something goes wrong at 2am on a Wednesday.
Mohammad understands this because he has worked inside it. At the Royal Scientific Society in Amman, he got his first look at quality control from the engineering side. At Loyalty Support Services, he added public safety to his remit, learning how quality failures become liability failures. Now at AlBandar Group, he is operating as a Quality Control Specialist — the person in the room responsible for making sure the gap between what a product claims to be and what it actually is stays as small as possible.
That gap is the whole job. Most people only see it when it closes badly.
Why EFQM certification matters here
The EFQM model is not a food-specific framework. It is an organizational excellence standard used across industries, and it requires assessors to evaluate systems, not just outcomes. For someone working in food safety, this is a different kind of discipline. You stop asking “did this batch pass?” and start asking “why does our system produce the batches it produces?”
That shift in thinking — from reactive to structural — is what separates food safety professionals who manage crises from those who prevent them. Mohammad made that shift early, and it shows in how he approaches his work.
The regional context
Gulf and wider Arab food markets are under pressure. Consumer expectations around Halal traceability, allergen labeling, and supply chain transparency are rising faster than most producers have adapted. Regulators in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan are tightening compliance requirements, and companies that treated quality as a checkbox function are finding out what that cost them.
Mohammad’s combination — nutrition science, ISO systems across food safety, environment and occupational health, plus Halal expertise — is not a common package. It is the kind of profile that matters when a company needs someone who can read a non-conformance report, trace it back to a process design problem, and write the corrective action that actually sticks.
Two years in, still building
He is 24. His career is barely started. But the pattern is clear: he takes the gaps in his knowledge seriously, fills them deliberately, and does not wait for someone to hand him a broader role before operating at that level.
For a region that needs more engineers who understand food systems end to end, that is worth paying attention to.