020421 Food Safety Summit Attracts Over 1,000

Florham Park, NJ - Over 1,000 food industry professionals from the nation's largest food manufacturers and restaurant chains gathered in Washington, DC for the Fourth Annual Food Safety Summit, the nation's largest event about food safety. The key topic of the event was food security, which was the subject of a keynote address by Homeland Security Director Gov. Tom Ridge. The Summit is sponsored by the National Food Processors Association, the National Restaurant Association, Food Safety Magazine and Eaton Hall Expositions.

“Food security and the risks of bioterrorism are the newest challenges for the food industry,” said Scott Goldman, president of Eaton Hall Expositions. “The Summit provided a forum for leaders from all sectors of the food industry to gather and share ideas and strategies on keeping our food supplies safe in a changed world. We are confident that everyone who attended walked away with new and valuable information to bring back to their colleagues, and that this will ensure that we continue to have the safest food supply in the world.”

The lineup of keynote speakers included Governor Tom Ridge, Director of Homeland Security who made national headlines with his address; Dr. Lester Crawford, the new Deputy Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, made his first major appearance since taking the helm of the FDA; Steven S. Reinemund, Chairman and CEO of PepsiCo; and Senator Pat Roberts (R-KS) also delivered keynotes on food policy in industry and government.

Over 75 presenters from industry leading companies such as Kraft, General Mills, Heinz, ConAgra, Hormel, Frito-Lay, Pepsi, Coca-Cola and others shared best practices and new methods for protecting food and ensuring quality and safety. Between sessions conference delegates lunched on hamburgers, which were electronically pasteurized to eliminate any harmful microbes. SureBeam, the nation's largest maker of food irradiation equipment and the same company which was tapped to irradiate the US Mail to eliminate anthrax, provided the burgers.

The conference kicked-off with a half-day seminar on Food Security presented by the National Food Processors Association. It covered assuring food security in a food plant, protecting products from tampering, assessing the risk of a bioterror event in the food supply, and more. The workshop included speakers from the FBI, the US Surgeon General's office, US Air Force, John Hopkins University, Dial Corporation and the National Restaurant Association.

Along with the conference, over 150 companies participated in the largest food safety trade show in the nation. These firms demonstrated everything from technologies that can detect E. coli, Salmonella, Listeria, and other microbes in minutes; to x-ray and metal detection equipment to reduce the risk of product contamination, to methods of cleaning, sanitizing, and pasteurizing, including steam systems, ozone devices, and food irradiation.

Attendance at the event was up more than 15% over last year, notable in a climate where budget cuts and limits on corporate travel have seen some recent conferences decline by 30% and 40%. Exhibit space grew by more than 25%, as more firms are finding food safety to be a growing market for their technologies. The Food Safety Summit is the largest exposition in the nation of products for food safety and quality assurance.

The Summit is sponsored by the National Food Processors Association (NFPA), the Washington, DC-based voice of the $500 billion food industry, the National Restaurant Association, the nation's leading foodservice association, and Food Safety Magazine, the leading publication about food safety and quality assurance. Eaton Hall Expositions, of Florham Park, NJ, which owns the event, created the Summit in 1999.

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