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Omnivore

Episode 52

2025 Food Industry M&A Forecast, 2025 Food Safety Trends, Securing Research Funding

Get the latest insights from the food science and technology community in the January 2025 episodes of the Omnivore podcast.

Jeff Grogg, a seasoned R&D professional who is founder and managing director of JPG Resources, shares his perspective on the 2025 food industry merger & acquisition market. Dr. Willette Crawford, principal consultant and owner of Katalyst Consulting, provides her forecast on whether the food safety challenges of 2024 will continue to be top problems for the food industry in this New Year, and what advancements in food science are trending to help the food system overcome them. Matthew Moore, an associate professor in the Department of Food Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, discusses the dire state of agrifood research funding in the United States and tips on how to find and secure funding.

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GUESTS

Jeff Grogg Jeff Grogg is founder and managing director of JPG Resources, a consulting and business development group that has commercialized thousands of food and beverage products and has focus areas of strategy and innovation, operations, and product/process development. Earlier in his career, Jeff was an R&D lead and member of the executive team at Kellogg that grew the Kashi brand from $25 million to $750 million in nine years. He has a B.S. degree in food science from Purdue University.

Willette Crawford Willette Crawford, PhD, MPH, PCQI, is principal consultant and owner of Katalyst Consulting LLC, which provides food safety and regulatory compliance support to food and agriculture companies. Crawford is one of the nation’s preeminent experts in food safety. While serving as a consumer safety officer with the produce safety staff at FDA, she led the agency’s first environmental assessment to investigate the E. coli O145 outbreak associated with romaine lettuce. Crawford also worked for Chick-Fil-A Supply as principal program lead, food safety and quality assurance, where helped build a logistics and distribution network for the national restaurant franchise, designing new distribution facilities and creating policies, procedures, and programs for the company to operate safely.

Matthew Moore Matthew Moore, PhD, is an associate professor in the Department of Food Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. In 2024, he was named the winner of IFT’s Outstanding Young Scientist Award for his significant, early-career research contributions that advance the science of food. His research primarily focuses on food safety microbiology with a focus on foodborne viruses. He received his undergraduate degree in food science from Cornell University, before earning his PhD in the same subject from North Carolina State University.

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Omnivore Podcast

Join the award-winning editors of Food Technology magazine every other Monday for Omnivore, the podcast that intersects the business of food and the science of food, through lively discussion and interviews with product innovators, leading researchers, policy makers, and thought leaders from across the world of food.