Make the Most of the Annual Meeting & Food Expo®

This issue of Food Technology features a comprehensive article about all of the educational events and activities planned for the 2014 IFT Annual Meeting & Food Expo^®, June 21–24, in New Orleans. After reading it, you’ll understand how, in just a few days, you can gain fresh insights, discover innovative ideas, and make more professional contacts than you will the rest of the year.

New Orleans, a city known for Mardi Gras, jazz, and Cajun cuisine, is the perfect place to celebrate IFT’s 75th anniversary. I hope you will join us for a variety of special events. Diamonds & Donations, our anniversary celebration fundraiser, will be held the evening of June 22 at historic Generations Hall. It’s a unique spot to dance the night away to the music of New Orleans band Brass-A-Holics with friends, colleagues, and clients.

Proceeds from our Diamonds & Donations event support the programs of Feeding Tomorrow, which include student scholarships, the Summer Scholars program, the Developing Solutions for Developing Countries Competition, the Food4Thought food science STEM initiative, and many others. Don’t miss this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to celebrate 75 years of food science!

You’ll also want to visit the Innovation Center on the Food Expo floor. As part of our 75th anniversary celebration, visitors will take an interactive trip into the history of food science and then look forward to the innovations to come.

The 2014 Annual Meeting begins with our Awards Ceremony, the evening of June21. We will honor 15 new IFT Fellows and 16 Achievement Award recipients. A new award this year is the Trailblazer Award & Lectureship sponsored by IFT and the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.

Trader Joe’s former President Doug Rauch is our keynote speaker at the Opening General Session the morning of June 22. He took Trader Joe’s from a small, nine-store grocery chain to a retail success story with more than 340 stores. He’ll share his thoughts about how to feed the world’s growing population in a healthy, sustainable way.

At the Opening General Session, we’ll also hear about our documentary film on the future of food that’s currently in production, and we’ll debut our new Day in the Life of a Food Scientist video featuring Cory Bryant of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

This year’s Beacon Lectures will feature Jane Karuku, President of Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, who will talk about global food security, and Hod Lipson, professor of engineering at Cornell University, who will discuss 3D food printing.

Each year more than 240,000 new food products are launched, more than 30,000 new outcomes of food research are published, and thousands of new food regulations are introduced. You can stay on top of all of these changes by taking advantage of the Annual Meeting Scientific Program. More than 100 peer-reviewed sessions, divided into 10 focus areas, make it easy to build a custom learning experience.

At the IFT Food Expo, you’ll find the industry’s largest collection of food ingredients, equipment, processing, and packaging suppliers. Attendees come year after year to see, touch, and taste the newest products, trends, and technologies while meeting face-to-face with the companies that provide them.

Sign up for a Technical Field Trip, which will give you the opportunity to visit a local business and gain an insider’s view of the unique ways food science is currently being applied. Take one of our nine pre-event Short Courses, which focus on current topics and are taught by experts in their respective areas.

I encourage you to use the event mobile app to plan your schedule, navigate the show floor, and network with your colleagues. You can download it from your device’s app store by searching for IFT 14.

Each year at about this time, I start to plan for the IFT Annual Meeting and Food Expo. I look forward to seeing old friends, learning about new scientific discoveries, and exploring the Food Expo to find out about developments in food ingredients and processing technologies. This year’s meeting will be filled with familiar events as well as some new ways we are working to enhance the experience for all attendees. I encourage you to sign up for the IFTSA/Feeding Tomorrow Fun Run & Walk to support scholarships for students in food science and technology and the IFT Cares program with Second Harvest Food Bank in New Orleans, which gives us the opportunity to share our time and spirit with those in a community that has given us so much enjoyment over the years.

I look forward to seeing each of you at another successful IFT Annual Meeting & Food Expo in New Orleans! 

 
Janet E. Collins, Ph.D., R.D., CFS,
IFT President, 2013–14
DuPont Corporate Regulatory Affairs
[email protected]