NSF Awards 2010 Food Safety Honors

Six individuals and organizations have been honored with NSF Int’l.’s 2010 Food Safety Leadership Awards. The winners:

Innovation in Training: California Strawberry Commission Food Safety Team, for developing commodity-specific, food-safety guidelines, an industry-wide risk assessment for the state’s production chain, and “Food Safety Practices for Strawberry Harvest Workers.”

Innovation in Equipment Design: FoodSafe Team, Intralox, for increasing sanitation efficiency and creating the industry standard in food processing technology solutions for food manufacturing and processing applications where sanitation is a critical component.

Innovation in System Improvement: Royal Commission for Jubail and Yanbu in Saudi Arabia, for spurring an increase in public-health and food-safety awareness by implementing a HACCP food-safety management system and establishing the country’s first food-handler training institute.

Innovation in System Improvement: Southern Nevada Health District, for dropping the region’s Hepatitis A incidences from 4,500 in 1997 to only 10 in ’09  by immunizing children and food handlers.

Innovation in Education: William Marler,  Marler Clark LLP, founder of informational blogs and websites educating the public about foodborne pathogens, and Outbreak Inc., which trains companies on preventing foodborne illness.

Innovation in Education: Dr. Catherine H. Strohbehn, Iowa State University, for educational outreach efforts on food safety, systems and human resources, including the SafeFood interactive, online food-safety lesson program.

An independent panel of food-safety experts from academia, industry and the regulatory community selected the winners, who were honored at the 2010 Food Safety Summit in Washington, D.C. on April 14.