By the time he was 30 years old, Felix Lin was vice president of Georgia’s Blue Bird Corp., and at 36, he is now the CEO of global food distributor HF Foods Group. The 2011 School of Business graduate said his Mercer education and experiences were monumental in the direction and progression of his career.
Lin grew up just a few hours from Macon in Valdosta, but he didn’t initially consider going to Mercer. He applied to three larger schools in Georgia and Alabama, but his applications were lost during a glitch in the process. At the urging of a friend, Lin applied to Mercer and was accepted soon after. He thought he’d transfer to another school after a semester or two, but he stayed.
“One semester in, I fell in love with the school,” he said. “The small community where everyone knows everyone, there’s just something to love about that atmosphere.”
Coming from a family of entrepreneurs, Lin knew at a young age that he wanted to go into business and majored in accounting and finance at Mercer. He got his foot in the door at Blue Bird during a summer internship, which led to a part-time job during his senior year.
After graduation, he took a full-time job at Blue Bird while working on a master’s degree in accounting at Georgia College and State University in the evenings. Later on, he earned a Master of Business Administration in global supply chain management, corporate finance and investment management from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Lin said he likes variety and change in his work, and his Blue Bird mentors allowed him to move to a different assignment every 12 to 18 months. He started in accounting and advanced to roles in finance, global business development, mergers and acquisitions, production supervision, human resource compliance and corporate strategy.
“In about 10 years, I went from an intern to becoming a vice president of the company. In that time, I had done everything basically with the exception of engineering. The education from Mercer really helped me,” said Lin, whose wife, Lauren Kritsas Lin, is a 2010 Mercer marketing graduate. “The environment where you can be who you are, the smaller classes … the social and personal skills that you’re able to accumulate outside of what you learn in classes really paid dividends for me, especially in a company like Blue Bird.”
In 2019, Lin joined the board of directors of HF Foods Group, a publicly traded company that is the market leader in the Asian specialty food service industry. He left Blue Bird and Georgia in 2022 when the opportunity arose to become the chief operating officer at HF Foods Group, based in Las Vegas. He became president in early 2024 and CEO earlier this year.
“Never in a million years would I have thought I’d move to Las Vegas and be in the food service business,” said Lin.
Lin is leading HF Foods Group during a time of transformation, and he hopes to build a lasting legacy as he works to expand the company’s footprint. As a major food distributor to Asian independent restaurants in the United States, the company brings in more than $1.2 billion in annual revenue, he said. It has 19 locations, including 14 distribution centers, four cross dock operations and one manufacturing facility throughout the country. It services over 15,000 restaurants and specialty grocery stores in 45 states.
“I really believe in the mission that we have,” Lin said. “It is the ability for us to bring culture together. At the end of the day, I came from an immigrant family myself. We always talk about the American dream. Being able to drive a business that has a close connection in terms of what America is all about, there’s a lot of value in that for me. Given my nature as someone who likes to bring change and change for the better, it just checks all the boxes for me, personally and professionally.”
Lin’s long-term goals include further solidifying HF Foods’s leadership position in the broader food service space and building the company into a nationally recognized brand. He also wants to do his part to provide more jobs and drive economic growth.
“I’ve been very fortunate in the way my career has progressed,” he said. “A lot of it had to do with how I grew up and the person I became through my experience at Mercer. Mercer holds a very special place in my heart. Even though Mercer is a smaller school … graduates of Mercer achieve big things, and I think I’m an example of that. I hope that more people can leverage that going forward with what Mercer has to offer.”
