Food Protection Trends

COMMENTARY from the Executive Director
March 2006

“We will look at longer-term projects for IAFP to keep the Association serving your needs ”
By David W. Tharp, IAFP Executive Director

Next month, the IAFP Executive Board and staff will spend time together in a planning session. I bring this to your attention in case you have suggestions that you might like the Board to consider. During the session, we will look at longer-term projects for IAFP to keep the Association serving your needs! You are welcome to contact any of our Board Members, or me, to convey your ideas. We welcome your input!

While I was thinking ahead to our planning session, I wanted to review our last “formal” planning session to be able to “see” the progress we made. Our last planning was conducted two years ago in April of 2004. After a quick review, I was amazed at the progress we actually made! A few of the projects may now be obsolete, but for the most part, we have made huge strides in two years’ time.

If you look back at the end of a day, a week or even a month, you don’t realize how much progress is being made on any certain project. Many times we feel frustrated because we don’t think that things are moving fast enough – especially in our fast-paced, “give-it-to-me-now” world! So, to be able to pull the two-year-old plan out and look it over was really fun to see the things we have accomplished.

Before I talk about the specific projects, I must explain that over these two years, the Board has kept constant monitoring of our plan as one of its priorities. I didn’t want you to have the impression that we are just now pulling out the two-year-old planning document to see if we made any progress! At each Board meeting, we look the projects over, break them down into smaller pieces, define responsibilities as to who will move the project forward and establish timelines to be met.

The one project that I consider the most notable achievement was planning and holding our first stand-alone meeting outside of North America. This, of course, was our European Symposium on Food Safety that was held last October in Prague. IAFP wanted to hold a symposium in Europe and it was on our priority list for a number of years (since 2000 I believe). A couple of circumstances kept us from acting on our earlier desires, but once it was on our 2004 planning document, the planning moved more rapidly forward. Now, as you may be aware, we are planning a second European Symposium for October or November of 2006!

Another project that we are proud of and have seen great progress on is the goal to grow the Foundation Fund to $1 million by 2010. Over the last couple of years, we have increased our efforts to convey to IAFP Members all of the wonderful sponsorship and support the IAFP Foundation provides to IAFP. We conducted a filming project at IAFP 2005 and developed a DVD video presentation to use in our fundraising effort. Part of our effort concentrated on bringing the Foundation to a more visible level at IAFP 2005. Along with Gale Prince’s challenge pledge at IAFP 2005, we raised more than $6,000 in contributions! Now the next phase is to put the DVD to use and make presentation visits to various companies who work with us to achieve our goal.

With monies already raised in the Foundation, we have been able to increase the support offered
to students (through travel scholar-ships) and speakers at the Annual Meeting. There are many additional projects waiting to be funded as the Foundation grows!

The last major project that I’ll review in this month’s column is improving access to IAFP journal articles. Our goal was to place additional articles from both the Journal of Food Protection and Food Protection Trends online for faster Member access. Two years ago, there were just three years of JFP articles available to online users. Over this period (the last two years) we placed additional volumes online and now have seven complete volumes available (back to 1999) and are adding the eighth year now (2006). JFP articles are fully searchable with linked references and very user-friendly! If you are searching for recent food science articles and not using JFP Online, you might want to consider adding access to your Membership!

For FPT, we undertook an effort to improve our online article availability for Members’ access. IAFP Members may log in to a “Members’ Only” section of the IAFP Web site to access FPT articles from 2000 through the current issue. So, if you are traveling and think about an article you recall seeing in FPT, you have immediate, 24-hour access to the article for reference purposes!

Just to note, the IAFP Member Directory has been available online since 2000. It is fully searchable
by name (first or last), employer, city, state or province, or country. The online directory provides an easy way to communicate with colleagues from around the world!