Celebrating IFT Achievers

Thirteen IFT members were honored with Achievement Awards in 2023. The award winners were celebrated in a ceremony at IFT FIRST.

Since IFT presented the first Nicolas Appert Award in 1942, IFT’s Achievement Awards have grown to 19 different categories, honoring excellence in research, applied science, and service to food science and technology.

“Recognizing individuals and teams for their remarkable contributions to food science and technology is a long-standing IFT tradition,” said 2023–2024 IFT President Sean Leighton at the awards ceremony. “This year, we honor 13 exemplary individuals who represent excellence in a variety of areas within the science of food—including research and innovation; leadership; diversity, equity, and inclusion; and lifetime achievement.”

As part of the process, IFT worked with the 2022 Awards & Fellows Task Force, a group of nine volunteers who helped reshape the process for nomination and selection of Achievement Award winners and Fellows. This included the implementation of self-nominations, clarification of criteria for awards, and standardization of required materials.

“Your many hours of dedicated work were, and are, very much appreciated,” 2022–2023 IFT President Chris Downs said of the task force at the awards ceremony. “I can’t thank you enough.”

The process of selecting the honorees starts with a jury of IFT members and volunteers who are appointed by the IFT Office of the President and led by a jury chair. The jury reviews nominations, completes ballots, and notifies IFT of the winner for each category.

Food Technology invited this year’s award winners to respond to a series of questions about issues of importance to the food system and their careers. Some of their thoughts follow.

Learn more about the 2023 IFT Achievement Award winners here or scroll down for an abbreviated list of winners.

Congratulations to the 2023 IFT Achievement Award winners on their accomplishments!

Why is this award meaningful to you?

“The Babcock-Hart Award has been a long-standing award with IFT, and it’s been a place to acknowledge those individuals in the realm of food for important contributions to address issues related to public health. Being part of that rich history is quite an honor.”
— Brent D. Flickinger

“This award validates my work and shows developing cost-effective, full processing techniques matters. And it validates my international collaboration with different parts of the world where we exchange ideas to promote food security.”
— Mian Nadeem Riaz

“This award is special because it is a recognition of all the volunteer hours you put into the programs and helping the local sections, or just IFT in general. We’re all members just making our experiences as members even better. I’m really thrilled about it.”
— Paul Raymond Cole

“I think it’s very special to me because this is something I’ve spent my entire career working on, and the recognition by IFT is tremendous. It’s a very humbling experience.”
— James S. Dickson

How does your work contribute to IFT’s mission and the advancement of the science of food?

“For more than 50 years, I have been engaged in research with traditional food products, mainly from Portugal. I feel like I can contribute the knowledge on those traditional processes, which have led to technological improvements and the possibility of developing new products.”
— F. Xavier Malcata

“Food science research plays a crucial role in advancing the science of food, and also promoting the production of sustainable and healthy food products. My work is to understand how different food components and the processing techniques impact the quality, safety, and the nutritional value of food products. I think with these types of new knowledge, we can develop new food products that better meet consumer needs and preferences, while also ensuring they are safe and healthy to eat.”
— Hang Xiao

“IFT’s mission is closely aligned with my lab’s work in the area of international food safety. We strive to provide expertise and to build capacity in lower- and middle-income countries to help develop better surveillance of foodborne pathogens.”
— Jasna Kovac

“I’m representing people of color, and I’m a food scientist. I’m here to give that other perspective that might be missing.”
— Paul Raymond Cole

How has your involvement with IFT impacted your career and work?

“I’ve been involved with several different societies, and being with like-minded individuals and being able to exchange your views and benefit from mutual interaction is very important, and this is true for IFT. And with IFT, it led me to initiate and establish a new division within [IFT], the Division of Nutritional and Functional Foods. So it has been very important to me.”
— Fereidoon Shahidi

“My career has taken many shifts and turns, but my membership in IFT has been consistent over the years. I’ve been involved in IFT at both local and national levels. I started on the technical side in a role in product development, and then transitioned to the business side of the food industry, working for both consumer companies and ingredient suppliers, and then finally moved into international development. IFT has enabled me to make many contacts, meet great people, and build businesses.”
— Donna Rosa

“I’ve always seen IFT as a leading international organization for food scientists, and I was lucky to be exposed to it early on in my career. My very first research publication was published in the Journal of Food Science, and now many years later I serve on the editorial board of that journal. Over the years, IFT has been very supportive of our local South African Association for Food Science and Technology, and the many opportunities for networking and the resources available are truly remarkable.”
— Riëtte de Kock

“IFT is one of those organizations that brings together stakeholders in the food industry and the food system, that being food makers, marketers, government, and academics. So having this all come together in one place provides an experience that brings realistic perspectives about the opportunities and limitations about food, science, and nutrition. These perspectives really give my career and work a framework that turned out to be rather useful.”
— Brent D. Flickinger

What does the concept of future-proofing the food system mean to you?

“It’s a really interesting concept. Ideally, no person should go hungry. As a human species, the onus is on us to ensure that we all do our part to reach this ideal. Future-proofing the food system means taking proactive steps to ensure that our food production, distribution, and consumption systems are resilient, adaptable, and sustainable in the face of future challenges and uncertainties.”
— Trust Beta

“To me, future-proofing the food system means that we can create a food system that can sustainably and efficiently produce and distribute food for the increasing demand of a growing population globally, and, at the same time, we need to take into account and mitigate the environmental impact of the production. This involves developing new technologies and innovations to improve food safety, reduce food waste, and enhance the nutritional value of food products.”
— Hang Xiao

“We all know that the world pop-ulation is increasing very rapidly, and we have to be able to feed the world and feed the hungry people. With that, there is a lot that can be done, and obviously my area is the zero-based processing of food. But it also starts at the farm. It is about an innovative way of producing food and addressing the needs of all people all around.”
— Fereidoon Shahidi

“For me, a future-proof system is a resilient system that basically can promote our healthy food habits. It can also enable us to make sustainable food for the future.”
— Mian Nadeem Riaz

Thinking about the focus areas of IFT FIRST, which area do you think is the most critical to improving food for everyone around the world?

“As a food safety professional, I have an obvious bias to food safety. But I think the most critical thing is thinking of these areas as critical components of an interconnected system. So any disruptions in one component can affect the entire system, and that can lead to suboptimal performance. Because of this interconnectedness, the most successful technologies and innovations will likely be those that will consider the net effects of individual components.”
— Jasna Kovac

“In my opinion, all the areas are important. But I would select education as one of the most important, because we need children to learn about selecting the most correct food in order to have a healthy life. Another area that I would feel is important right now is sustainability because we need to reduce the amount of food byproducts that are generated on a daily basis.”
— Ana Sanches Silva

“If I had to pick just one of those critical areas, I would say that it is health and nutrition. When we look at every culture and population around the world, the issues that they’re facing with the food supply always revolve around the issue of nutrition, such as getting sick from unsafe food, overeating, or having a large amount of food that is nutrient poor.”
— Rebecca A. Creasy

What innovations do you think are most critical to overcoming the challenges our food system faces?

“I believe it is the problem of sustainability of food pro-duction. It’s probably the nuclear problem. We have a growing population, and so we need to have better food, but also more food. And at the same time, we are facing the effects of climate changes, which are occurring faster than we ever expected. We must be able to get new systems so that we can address the future.”
— F. Xavier Malcata

“I have three suggestions that I think are critical. The first is embracing precision agriculture, like full utilization of technology such as sensors, drones, and machine learning to optimize crop yields and reduce food waste. Secondly, promoting regenerative or alter-native agricultural practices, which is a holistic approach that involves working with natural ecosystems to create a more resilient and sustainable food system. And last, promoting short-season grains like sorghum and long-term crops such as cassava, which are drought tolerant and require less water and fertilizer, making them a more sustainable choice.”
— Trust Beta

“I think that the most innovations thus far that will help us continue to face these issues with a safe and abundant food supply include our research into alternative types of proteins, particularly plant-based proteins and other alternative sources like insects. So we know that there’s less arable land that’s currently available to us, but with new discoveries that we’re making with these alternative protein sources, we can ensure that even as the population grows, we’ll still be able to have a food supply that is nutrient dense.”
— Rebecca A. Creasy

How does your work contribute to the future-proofing of the food system?

“The impact that I personally make to future-proof the food system is to build capacity through food science, teaching, learning, and research that are contributing to the development of food scientists, and particularly sensory scientists on the African continent.”
— Riëtte de Kock

“I’m trying to bring food science and technology to food insecure areas of the world to increase the year-round food supply, improve nutrition, reduce food waste, and ensure food safety. We can’t have an inclusive, sustainable food system until all eight billion people on this planet are properly fed and nourished.”
— Donna Rosa

“I work on food packaging, so I try to develop new analytical tools in order to ensure that the foods we are consuming are safely packaged. I studied the migration phenomenon in order to see the factors that most affect the migration and transfer of compounds from the packaging to the food. But I also work on development. So in this line we are trying to develop new food packaging in order to extend shelf life.”
— Ana Sanches Silva

“What I’ve done for my career has been primarily food safety, which, of course, is an integral part of any type of future-proofing of food systems. It’s not just the quantity of food or the nutritional aspects of it, but it’s also the fact that we don’t want to inadvertently make people sick with the food that they need to survive.”
— James S. Dicksonft