Amy Proulx of Niagara College, Canada, writes on her experience of the North American Food Safety Summit

Over the past 2 days, June 7 and 8, 2021, food safety leaders from across North America joined the North American Food Safety Summit, and I had the privilege of being one of the hosts for the event along with my friend, Dr Darin Detwiler at Northeastern University. Setting up a web cam feed that works for camera angles and manages all the scripts and notes effectively takes creativity. To get a good camera angle, I set up a step ladder, and staged all my scripts, schedules and questions along the ladder steps.  You can see my bag of snacks off to the left, as we were engaged each day upwards of 4-5 hours straight in live sessions.  As I went through script, to get finished sections out of my line of sight, I would toss it onto the office floor.  It was really great, but I was fixed to the webcam during almost the entire session.  

We had over 200 participants engaged in dialogue and conversation over two days, building relationships for food safety.  We discussed the human dynamics of food safety culture and training, along with the rapid advances into internet connectivity, IOT (Internet of Things), blockchain and big data as part of the solution.  Our core conclusions - we need to cooperate and collaborate, be change leaders and keep on learning.  

Photo - left, Neil Betteridge, Senior Vice President, Global Manufacturing, Fairlife - a Division of Coca Cola; top right, Wendy Kauffman, Vice President of Reputation Management, Brown and Cohen Communications and Public Affairs; bottom right, Jacqui d'Eon, Principal at JAd'E Communications Ltd.