Conference Presentation Schedule: Food Safety Summit, MSU Law School, IAFP, and More

The research-education-outreach cycle is sparked by practitioners. Each of my research projects started with someone who identified a real-world problem. Let’s meet: my next public events are the Food Safety LATAM Conference (Cancun), Food Safety Summit (Chicago), MSU Law Conference (East Lansing), and the IAFP Annual Meeting (LA).

Thinking back, each of my major food fraud prevention breakthroughs – including shifting my focus from ‘food counterfeiting’ to ‘food fraud’ – came from interacting with government, industry, and academic colleagues. Three key breakthroughs were refining the focus to ‘food fraud,’ applying criminology and situational crime prevention, and then using Enterprise Risk Management (ERM/COSO) to compare food fraud to all food marketplace risks. Along the way, each new idea seems to come from a discussion or trying to understand a problem.

• Refining my focus to Food Fraud: While interacting with the food industry around 2007, a leader (“MM”) said: “I’m not just worried about counterfeiting. We’ve got a wider range of problems.” Also, they stated, “I need to figure out how to manage all these problems, not just one at a time.” I said, “Well, what if our work covers all types of fraud and prevention?”
• Realizing the Root Cause is in Social Science and Criminology: Around 2009, the first person to bring the Criminology theory of Situational Crime Prevention to food fraud research in the MSU School of Criminal Justice colleague was Dr. Robyn Mace. Later, another MSU School of Criminal Justice colleague, Dr. Justin Heinonen, helped refine that focus into the SARA method and from a Victimology perspective. Later and currently, Dr. Roy Fenoff is my key criminology colleague.
• Learning about Enterprise Risk Management/ COSO to define ‘how much is enough’: Around 2007, at two breakfast meetings, I complained about being unable to explain the food fraud problem concerning other company risks. An academic college (“CS”) and an industry chief risk officer (“AP”) recommended considering ERM/ COSO.

So, you can see that ‘outreach’ has been critical, and I keep traveling, presenting, and talking to people.

My upcoming presentations are scheduled for:

April 29

• Presentation and Panel Participant, Food Safety LATAM (Latin American) Summit, April 29 & 30, 2024, Cancun, Mexico
  • Panel participant: Panel led by Frank Yiannas: Emerging technologies and the Smarter Food Safety era
  • Plenary Session: Food Supply Chain disruptions. The new normal.
  • https://congresolatam.com/en

May 6

• Food Fraud Prevention Certificate Workshop, Food Safety Summit, May 6, 2024, 9 am to 5 pm, Rosemont, IL (Chicago)
  • https://www.food-safety.com/food-safety-summit/agenda

May 29

• Plenary Session: Food Fraud Emerging and Evolving Compliance Requirements, MSU Global Food Law Seminar, May 29, 2024, East Lansing, MI
  • https://www.law.msu.edu/food-law-seminar/index.html

July 14

• IAFP – International Association for Food Protection, Chair’s Opening Remarks & Overview of the Food Fraud Prevention Professional Development Group (PDG), July 14, 2024, 8:30 am, Long Beach, California (Los Angeles)
  • https://www.foodprotection.org/annualmeeting

August 28

New MSU Undergraduate & Graduate Supply Chain Management Courses (These are not conferences but they are publicly available events, see https://msu.edu/)

• Procurement Contracting (SCM 460/ SCM 860): Workshop in procurement contracting including terms and conditions, legal terms and conditions, and contracting negotiation.
  • Regarding Food Fraud: this includes supplier certification and commodity monitoring.
• Customs, Compliance and Security (SCM 461): Workshop in customs including the role of customs and border protection, supply security programs, export programs and tariffs, brokers, and trusted traders.
  • Regarding Food Fraud: this includes food fraud prevention as well as food defense.

Food Fraud Prevention Group Meeting

I would love to meet up if you are attending any of these meetings. If we don’t set up one-on-one sessions, let’s have a group meeting at 5 pm the afternoon after each of my presentations. The location can be at the front of the main exhibition hall. It would be great for a group of us to have a food fraud prevention discussion.