COVID-19’s impact on the food safety community has been significant and its impact will continue to be felt for years.

While FDA inspections and supplier audits are resuming, one cannot assume that the food industry is going back to 2019 or even that it should. It’s time for a food safety reboot or Food Safety 2.0.

Call it what you want, the industry must not only adapt to the “New Normal” but strategize on how to navigate through new challenges, including supply chain capacity and diversity of capacity, workforce welfare and retention, food defense and cybersecurity, food integrity, increased need for traceability, climate change’s impact on food safety, new challenges in supplier audits and compliance, mentoring and developing the future FSQA Leaders and lastly, the next regulations.

The goal now is not to get food safety back to 2019 levels but to build it better. These issues must be discussed among peers and best practices must be shared. You can’t do that in a webinar or in the traditional conference setting of didactic “death-by-PowerPoint” lectures.

To help facilitate this much needed critical thinking and meeting of the minds, the 10th annual Food Safety Consortium Conference, managed and curated by Food Safety Tech is back to an in-person format, October 19–21, 2022 at the Hilton Parsippany, New Jersey (20 minutes from Newark Liberty Airport and 29 miles outside on New York City).

With a capped audience of 250, the 2022 Food Safety Consortium Conference program has been designed to encourage true peer-to-peer networking and sharing of best practices. The program features many discussion groups including “The Days FSQA Professionals Fear the Most,” “Strategic Challenge: Engagement of Management” and “What is the current state of the food safety industry and where is it going?”

You will not just attend the Food Safety Consortium, you will actively participate in the program that features strategic and critical thinking topics that have been developed for both industry veterans and future FSQA Leadership.

I hope you can join us and participate in the meeting of the minds in October.