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

Featured Guests

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  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.
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  Willette Crawford, PhD, MPH, PCQI

  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.
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  Matthew Moore, PhD

  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.