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<< back to the 2002 archive listing << Dairy, Food and Environmental Sanitation Postcards from Iowa, April 2002 The Annual Meeting is fast approaching! Hello! Check your calendars! The Annual Meeting is fast approaching! The program for IAFP 2002 promises to be one of the best that we have had. Fully one third more abstracts were submitted than last year, resulting in a truly outstanding program. The Program Committee had to schedule several “short” sessions for Tuesday afternoon, rather than the one general session, simply to include as many of the accepted abstracts as possible. I think it is a sign of the strength of the Organization that we have to worry about having too many good abstracts submitted, and that we have to be creative in fitting them all into the program. The Program Committee really had some challenges this year, and they did an incredible job of putting it all together. You may have noticed that the Annual Meeting is a month earlier than usual. The meeting begins on Sunday, June 30 and ends on the evening of July 3. You may have wondered why we changed the date, and there were several factors that went into that decision. I think it would help if I explained the process for deciding on the location and time of the Annual Meeting. First, because of the size and growth of our Annual Meeting, we find that we are becoming more restricted in the locations. We are a victim of our own success! Fewer and fewer locations and hotels can accommodate what our Annual Meeting has become. As the locations become more restricted, we have to work further in advance. You may not realize it, but as we speak we are already narrowing the choices for the 2005 meeting. And what was even more surprising to me, many of the locations and hotels are already booked. We do try to move our meeting around geographically, so that we don’t always meet in the same part of the country. In addition, since many of our attendees and exhibitors attend other meetings (notably IFT and NEHA), we have to try to avoid overlapping our meeting with one of the others. This is particularly true for exhibitors, who often need a two-week window between meetings to arrange for the transportation of their displays. For San Diego, we had to work around several of these issues. There were only two hotels that could accommodate us, and those had conflicts with our regular dates. While we could have worked around these, the rooms would have been even more expensive than they are now. We do try to keep our room rates as low as possible, although San Diego is one of our more expensive meeting locations. The end result was that we could have the meeting in San Diego, if we were willing to move the dates to either early July or late August. Since late August would have conflicted with the start of school, we opted for early July. The IFT meeting is in Anaheim this year, and that meeting ends on Wednesday, June 19. This means that for many of our exhibitors and some of our Members, they have just 10 days off before the start of the IAFP meeting. Since the exhibitor booths will already be in Southern California, it will not present a problem for them to simply move from the Los Angeles area to San Diego. Having said all of that, wait until you see the location! While we have been in many, many beautiful locations in the past, I believe that I have a new favorite. The hotel is on the waterfront, and the view from the 40th floor, looking out over Coronado Island, is incredible. I think you will be pleased with the location and with the accommodations. The meeting rooms, including those for the technical sessions and the professional development groups, are outstanding. I don’t think that anyone will be disappointed. Plan to come, attend the sessions and share experiences with old and new friends. We look forward to seeing you there. Same time, next month. |