Food Protection Trends - November/December 2023 - 514

JOHN H. SILLIKER LECTURE
FOOD SAFETY WITH PURPOSE:
REFLECTION, EXECUTION
AND FORESIGHT
RANDY HUFFMAN, Ph.D.
Chief Food Safety and Sustainability Officer
Maple Leaf Foods
Mississauga, Ontario, Canada
The safest food is
made with purpose.
Although this lecture's
namesake, Dr. John
Silliker, entered the food
safety field somewhat
accidentally when
assigned to work with
the Army's Salmonella
researcher during World
War II, he transformed
that " accidental event "
into a purposeful career
that shaped the food industry and enhanced the
food supply. His remarkable career shows us the
power of embracing the unexpected and working
purposefully.
Among his incredible innovations was something
simple but fundamental to food microbiology:
the environmental sponge-sampling method that
enabled us to take wide-area and aggressive swabs
of our processing environments to assess sanitary
conditions. The entire industry has benefited from
this simple, impactful innovation.
Although Dr. Silliker came to the food industry
accidentally, for me, it was somewhat preordained
given that my father was a meat science professor
at Auburn University, and I raised livestock as
part of 4-H and FFA. At that time, I never thought
food safety would become a critical part of my
career path. Back then, I focused on the biology
of conversion of livestock to food, product
development and meat quality, and that passion led
me to a Ph.D. in Meat Science.
But like Dr. Silliker, fate put both a need and an
opportunity in front of me. It was 1993, and I was in
my first role after graduate school leading product
development and technical services for a retailready
ground beef company. Our biggest customer
had read a popular news story and press release
that E. coli O157:H7 was a problem found only in
514 Food Protection Trends November/December
older cow trimmings, not young, fed beef trimmings.
Based on this circumstantial, and later unproven
conclusion, our customer wanted to stop doing
business with us.
That moment, my career trajectory changed, as
I had to quickly learn what I could about the risks
and educate and reassure a customer that we
would take all the steps available to us to mitigate
this risk. Ultimately, with data and perseverance,
we demonstrated to this important customer that
we could produce ground beef safely with these
raw materials.
However, this experience demonstrated to me
that there were far too many unknowns about
the microbiological safety of meat products.
My curiosity was piqued. By the early 2000s,
it became clear to meat industry leaders that
we had arrived at an important juncture when
the industry needed to show strong food safety
leadership rooted in sound science.
The industry was willing to put money where it
mattered: re-invigorating and funding the American
Meat Institute research Foundation (AMIF). I was
given the opportunity to lead that food safety
research program, and we made food safety a
non-competitive issue to encourage sharing among
competitors in hopes we'd find practical solutions to
the time's most challenging meat safety issues.
At AMIF, we worked with academic research
groups and industry partners to fund important, and
solutions-focused research on technologies and
interventions targeted at reducing the public health
impact of E. coli O157:H7 in fresh beef and Listeria
monocytogenes in ready-to-eat meats.
During this same chapter, the National Toxicology
Program and the State of California questioned
sodium nitrite safety. These challenges threatened
the use of the very ingredient originally incorporated
into processed meats to prevent one of the deadliest
foodborne pathogens: Clostridium botulinum. Our
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