08.30 Registration & Networking – Mini-Exhibition Open
THEME FOCUS ONE: THE TECHNOLOGY OPPORTUNITY
09.00 Chair’s Welcome & Opening Address
✦ NEW FORMAT
09.05 What Is the Food Safety Industry Getting Most Wrong Right Now?
Session | AI In Food Safety
✦ UPDATE 2026
09.15 AI In Food Safety: Real Applications, Honest Limitations & How To Implement Without Losing Human Oversight Or Accountability
- From visual inspection cameras on production lines to AI-driven complaint analysis and early warning systems – cut through the hype with case studies showing what is genuinely working in food safety operations right now
- Understand where AI delivers the most value: predictive risk detection, supplier performance monitoring, manufacturing plant analytics and consumer feedback integration – and where the technology still falls short
- Confront the industry’s biggest AI blind spot: when teams stop feeling accountable because a system is doing the checking, what happens when something goes wrong – and how do you build oversight into your adoption strategy from day one?
Ilker Turker, Food Safety Manager, Ferrero
Session | Digital Infrastructure
✦ NEW 2026
09.40 From Data Chaos To Predictive Quality: Building The Digital Infrastructure That Makes AI Actually Work In Your Organisation
- You cannot apply AI on top of paper: understand the critical journey from reactive quality management to preventive to predictive – and the data foundations your business must have in place before AI can deliver meaningful results
- Automate data collection from machines, integrate testing data across factory, supplier and consumer systems, and break down the silos that prevent your organisation from seeing the full picture
- Hear how leading businesses are using integrated data ecosystems to predict likely quality outcomes before problems occur – and what that means for the future of food safety management
Session | Digitalising Traceability
10.05 Digitalising Traceability: Moving Beyond Paper, Silos & Spreadsheets To Achieve Real End-To-End Supply Chain Visibility
- Despite two decades of digitisation across almost every other business function, paper-based traceability remains shockingly common across the food industry – hear from those who have made the leap and what it actually took to get there
- Understand what genuine end-to-end traceability looks like: from raw material origin and field-level controls through to finished product release, batch reference accuracy and rapid recall response capability
- Explore the role of integrated digital traceability as the essential foundation for AI adoption, food fraud detection and supply chain resilience – and why businesses that delay are compounding every other risk on today’s agenda
10.40 Morning Break, Informal Networking & Mini-Exhibition
THEME FOCUS TWO: THE FOUNDATIONS
double perspective | Food Safety Cultures
11.10 Food Safety Culture: Measuring What Matters, Correcting What Does Not & Embedding Real Accountability Across The Whole Business
- Food safety culture is no longer a nice-to-have: it is now an explicit compliance requirement under FSSC 22000 and GFSI certification standards – understand what the latest position paper requires, what has changed and what your business must now demonstrate
- Move beyond posters and training sessions to assess your organisation’s true cultural maturity: explore the tools, metrics and benchmarking approaches that tell you where your gaps actually are and how to act on them
- The hardest challenge is not the quality team – it is everyone else! Hear how leading businesses are embedding food safety behaviours into procurement decisions, operational practices and leadership accountability well beyond the factory floor
Perspective One:
Ioanna Maki, QA Manager, McDonald’s
Perspective Two:
Geke Naaktgeboren-Stoffels, Quality, Nutreco
Topical Panel Debate | Allergen Management
✦ UPDATE 2026
11.50 Allergen Management: Moving From Fear-Based Reactions To Science-Led Controls That Genuinely Protect Consumers Without Paralysing Your Operations
- Allergens remain one of the most emotionally-charged areas of food safety – but emotional responses and operational panic are not the same as effective allergen control: understand how to apply science, thresholds and risk assessment rather than blanket precaution
- Get up to date on the latest international developments around quantitative risk assessment and allergen threshold science – and what the evolving divergence between international allergen lists means for your labelling and production decisions
- Address the growing problem of unjustified precautionary allergen labelling head-on: understand when a PAL is legally and scientifically defensible, when it is not, and how to build allergen control systems that are both rigorous and operationally practical across multi-site and multi-market operations
Simon Flanagan, Research Fellow Food Safety – R&D, Mondelēz International
Manuela Beatrisotti, International Compliance Associate Director, Barilla Group
Aneta Kostova, Head of Quality & Safety, Foster Clark
Red Card Format Panel Debate | Recalls & Crisis Management
✦ NEW 2026 FORMAT
12.30 Recalls & Crisis Management: Standardising Your Response, Accelerating Your Timelines & Protecting Your Brand When It Matters Most
- There is no set industry standard for recall management – and that gap is costing businesses time, money and consumer trust every time a product needs to come off shelf: share and stress-test your own approach against peers and experts in a session where disagreement is not just welcome, it is designed in
- Understand the critical difference between a product recall and a full crisis management scenario – and why conflating the two leads to slower decisions, confused communication and greater reputational damage when things go wrong
- Learn from real recall scenarios: what good communication timelines look like, how to coordinate across retailers, regulators and internal teams simultaneously, and what the businesses who handled recalls well did differently from those who did not
Idwin Bouman, Head of QA, Vivera
13.00 Lunch For All Speakers, Delegates & Partners
13.10 Informal Peer-To-Peer Networking Discussions
Self-select your topic of interest. All discussions held under Chatham House rules.
Table 1 How are you actually using AI right now – and what is not working?
Table 2 Building food safety culture in practice.
Siska Ten Hoeve, Quality Director Global Supply Points, Nutreco
Table 3 Managing allergens across multi-site and multi-market operations.
Table 4 Geopolitics and supply chain: how are you diversifying and de-risking your sourcing?
THEME FOCUS THREE: THE THREATS
14.00 Afternoon Chair Opening Remarks
Kath Dunbar, Senior Scientific & Regulatory Affairs, Mars Wrigley
Session | Microbiological Risks
14.10 Horizon Scanning: Emerging Microbiological Risks, Next-Generation Sequencing & What Your Testing Strategy Needs To Look Like Right Now
- Get ahead of the legislative curve: understand the practical implications of incoming Listeria legislation changes, what additional testing will be required to demonstrate compliance and why businesses without robust digital testing systems will feel the impact most
- Explore the frontier of microbiological science: from whole genome sequencing and metagenomic analysis to pathogen speciation tracking across low-risk and high-risk production environments – and how traditional testing and digital microbiology must now work together
- Antimicrobial resistance is emerging as one of the industry’s most serious long-term concerns: understand the current state of knowledge, what the commercial implications are and what monitoring procedures and industry alignment look like in practice
Session | Reserved Case Study
14.30 Supply Chain & Emerging Threats In Practice
A practitioner shares a real-world example directly relevant to this theme focus- practical, specific and immediately applicable to your own operation.
Session | Supply Chain Resilience
14.40 Supply Chain Resilience: Sourcing, Verifying & Protecting Your Supply Chain When Geopolitics, Climate & Conflict Keep Changing The Rules
- From geopolitical instability, shipping disruptions and the Ukraine conflict to shifting US trade policy and so many more are forcing fundamental rethinks in sourcing strategies, supplier relationships and contingency planning – hear how leading businesses are building genuine resilience rather than just reacting to the next disruption
- Emergency supplier switching creates hidden food safety risk: when you change an ingredient source under pressure, how do you verify that new supplier properly, assess allergen implications, maintain traceability and ensure your product still meets specification – without slowing the line?
- Build a supply chain that can absorb shock: from diversifying origins and strengthening supplier approval processes to improving real-time visibility and decision-making agility when disruption strikes next
Frank Braun, Chief Sustainability Officer, Hälssen & Lyon
Topical Panel Discussion | Food Fraud & Food Defence
15.00 Food Fraud & Food Defence: Closing The Gaps That Bad Actors Exploit & Embedding Watertight Detection Into Your Supply Chain
- Food fraud is increasing and enforcement at borders is not keeping pace: understand the scale of the problem, the most vulnerable points in your supply chain and why deliberate adulteration is so difficult to detect when origin documents have been falsified upstream
- Food defence demands its own strategy separate from food fraud prevention – and most businesses do not have one: from vulnerability mapping and site security protocols to the lessons of real-world food crime cases, hear what a serious food defence programme looks like in practice
- Traceability, supplier verification and allergen controls are your first line of defence against fraud entering your supply chain: understand how the strongest food safety systems make fraud harder to commit, easier to detect and faster to trace when it does occur
Jemila Boye-Okit, Global Quality, Supplier Risk & Performance Lead, Barry Callebaut Group
Session | chemical contaminants
15.30 Chemical Contaminants
Alexandre Panchaud, Head of Nestlé Food Safety & Analytical Sciences Institute, Nestlé
15.50 Afternoon Break, Informal Networking & Mini Exhibition
THEME FOCUS FOUR: THE CHANGING LANDSCAPE
Session | Changing Regulations
✦ UPDATE 2026
16.20 Navigating The Evolving Regulatory Environment – What Is Changing, What Is Coming & How To Get Your Business, Teams & Supply Chains Ready
- What is changing across the global food safety regulatory landscape – from major standards updates and new compliance requirements to the practical implications of shifting food legislation for businesses operating across multiple markets
- Packaging is becoming a food safety issue as well as a sustainability one: understand the food contact and safety implications of new packaging legislation, recycled materials and the questions your packaging decisions now need to answer from a regulatory perspective
- Multiple regulatory changes are moving simultaneously across labelling, allergens, microbiological criteria and market-specific requirements – hear how to prepare your systems, teams, suppliers and product development pipelines for what is already on its way
Topical Panel Discussion | Embedding Food Safety Culture Throughout
16.40 Making Food Safety Everyone’s Responsibility – Leadership, Learning Culture & The Behaviours That Actually Drive Lasting Change Across Your Organisation
- The systems, certifications and procedures are largely in place across the industry – the remaining gap is human: how do you build an organisation where people do the right thing when nobody is watching, not because they have to but because they genuinely understand why it matters?
- Fight corporate amnesia: when experienced food safety professionals leave, institutional knowledge and hard-won lessons walk out with them – hear how leading businesses are capturing, embedding and transferring food safety knowledge so that culture outlasts any individual
- From top management commitment and reward and recognition programmes to empowering individuals on the production line and aligning procurement decisions with food safety values – explore the full architecture of a food safety culture that works and how to measure whether yours is getting stronger or weaker over time
Lalitha Sivasundaram, Technical Director, Seagems
Marta Baffigo, R&D Scientific, Regulatory Affairs EMEA & APAC Senior Director, Cargill
Javier Chavarria, Technical Manager Africa &French Territories, Suntory Beverage & Food Europe
Miguel Cortes de Abreu, QFS Manager at Bimbo EMEA, Grupo Bimbo
Session | Reserved Case Study
17.10 Reserved Open Case Study
A practitioner shares a real-world example directly relevant to this theme focus.
17.30 Close & Networking