Don't Eat Poop! A Food Safety Podcast

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Sharon Beals: I wish I could bottle having a near death experience so that others would learn. You would think, you'd look at the headlines, but all too often, and this is something else I'm on a soapbox about, we're in the food business. We have to quit thinking about, oh, that's a meat problem. That's a baby food problem.

That's a produce problem. You know what? Sanitation is sanitation. The slicer doesn't care if you slice cilantro or salami. It gets dirty the same way. And we have to, as a food industry, learn from other sectors that are doing things generally really well.

intro: Nobody likes getting sick. That's why heroes toil in the shadows, keeping your food safe at all points from the supply chain to the point of sale. Join industry veterans, Francine L. Shaw and Matt Ragusi for a deep dive into food safety. It all boils down to one golden rule. Don't eat poop. Don't eat poop.

Matt Regusci: Hello. Hello, Francine. Hi, Matt. Okay. So we are at the food safety Consortium. We've been talking with you now for like 15 minutes and, I was like, we can't stop, we gotta be, this is great stuff to be recording. So, please, introduce yourself. What is it that you do? And let's just start riffing.

Sharon Beals: This is Sharon Beals and I, Left corporate America in January of this year, and I do the, call it the fractional pu platter portfolio career.

There was actually an article. It was called the portfolio career or the pu pu platter. So I represent Beacon Point Labs. I am the executive director of of the Women's Meat Industry Network. I'm the incoming president of the American Meat Science Association. I sit on various boards like Alliance for Advanced Sanitation and Women in Agribusiness and I became a grandmother three weeks ago, which is the best new title of the year.

Matt Regusci: That is awesome.

Francine L Shaw: Amazing. Congratulations. So we have to talk. You've got the poop platter and we're telling people not to eat poop.

Sharon Beals: Well, yeah, but it's P U as opposed to P O O.

Francine L Shaw: Okay.

Sharon Beals: Okay. So we had to clarify. Pu platter. Wait a minute. Haven't you ever watched The Lion King? Does that not never, you don't know what a pu platter is?

Francine L Shaw: I watched it as a long, probably 40 years ago.

Matt Regusci: Is that when they had the bugs?

Sharon Beals: You get the, all the smorgasbord of stuff that comes on one platter and Chinese restaurants had a little fire in the middle thing that you could grill stuff on.

Matt Regusci: I did not realize it was P U P U. I thought it was P O P O O. We're learning things every day. Every day.

Francine L Shaw: Every interview. Every interview. We've had interactions on LinkedIn over the last, many months, but I first met you in person at the Food Safety Summit. You stopped when we were talking in the hallway there and your personality is just so outgoing and I was just so drawn because you were just I don't know. The energy was...

Sharon Beals: I'm old. I have no filter.

Francine L Shaw: I know. So it was like I knew immediately that it was going to be a connection because only people without filters understand other people without filters.

Sharon Beals: Now I know why my oma was the way she was.

Francine L Shaw: Everybody else gets offended. I guess... so, where do we start?

Sharon Beals: Well, as I've been thinking about this, when you asked me yesterday to do this, I thought there's a lot of burnout in the food safety world.

And we clearly have had our share of incidents across the food sector. And I think back to a food safety HACCP class that I had with Pete Snyder back in the 80s when I was at Arby's. And for those that don't know Pete Snyder, he was way ahead of his time. And he said, you know what, forget those hand washing signs in the restrooms.

Take them all down and put up signs that say employees must remove the shit from their hands before they return to work. And we all gasped. Oh my God, we've paid this man to come in and he's using foul language. Not that we didn't, of course, but he says you have to be provocative if you're going to make a difference in food safety.

So the more I thought about this whole being provocative, I'm going to throw out something provocative as a challenge to the industry, because we truly don't need food safety and quality professionals in our plants.

If everybody behaved like Bob Jackson. And you're like, who the hell's Bob Jackson? Right.

God rest his soul. Bob was the plant manager when I worked at Land O’Frost. Bob and my, my one up. Bob Culler held everybody accountable, treated everybody equally, and the plant ran really well. We all could have reported to Bob. You know, a lot of what we're hearing today in some of these issues is, did the food safety quality team report to operations or where were they reporting?

Did they have a direct line of sight to the head of the whole entire organization? Because we need a seat at the table. Well, you know what? We all could have had a seat at Bob's table and the plant would have been just fine. Because here's an example. I'm a QC technician, second shift. I walk out to the floor and there's product all over the floor.

I shut the line down. I felt like Norma Rae. You can relate to that. You probably don't have any idea who Norma Rae is. Bob comes out to the floor in his short sleeved white shirt and tie and frock, looks around, looks at me, smiles. Nods, walks off, goes up to the cafeteria, found the supervisor and said, get your butt down there.

Sharon, she's got your floor shut down and you need to fix it. It wasn't, Sharon, why do you have the floor shut down? I mean, it was evident. There was product all over the floor. But I was not the one responsible for it. If everybody behaved like Bob Jackson, we wouldn't need to have food safety quality people.

My boss and I, we were there because we had to collect customer data and we were doing all that type of stuff, running the analytical tests, what have you. But they held everybody accountable. But unfortunately, not everybody's like Bob.

Matt Regusci: Wow. God bless you, Sharon, for telling that story. That is so crystal clear what you're talking about.

Not everybody is like Bob. That speaks directly into what everybody is talking about with food safety culture.

Sharon Beals: Oh, don't get me started on food safety culture. Because you cannot have any niche culture food safety, quality, personal safety, any of them, if you don't have a company culture of doing the right thing. It's not sustainable.

Matt Regusci: 100%.

Francine L Shaw: We talk about this all the time. Food safety culture has become a buzzword. And nobody wants to stand behind it. They just want to use the term. And we need people that stand behind food safety culture. And everybody wants to throw that word out there, but nobody wants to do the work it takes to implement what food safety culture really is.

Sharon Beals: I worked in Maple Leaf Foods for six years. I joined them in January of 2010. Of course, the recall was August of 2008. There is a company that has a culture of doing the right thing, whether it's personal safety, food safety, quality, all the things as the buzzword is, right? Fast forward to 2024, and that's still how they operate every day.

Doesn't matter who's watching. And that's my provocative thought.

Do we really need to have separate food safety quality teams if everybody just does the right thing?

Francine L Shaw: So what do you think it's going to take for corporate America? to get the message that we've all got to do, everybody, everybody in the plant has got to do the right thing.

Not just when people are watching, but all the time, everything all the time.

Sharon Beals: So is everyone bonused and incentivized on doing the right thing? Or are you incentivized on good pounds out the door or just total pounds out the door? Despite Bob Jackson, his assistant plant manager, whom I don't think he picked.

Was the antithesis of Bob Jackson. And that's why we needed myself and Bob to keep this person in check. We were going to lay off the second shift because volume had dropped. And he had already told the second shift people that in two weeks, you're losing your job. And then that night was short a person to run one of the lines.

He looked at me, he says, you're going to run the slicer tonight. I said, no, I'm not, not my job. I'm not trained for it. It's not safe. I have other tasks that I have to do. If I tell you what's your job, it's your job. I said, we'll see about that. Promptly called my boss who called Bob Jackson. And the next day, Mr. Jackson had this person apologize to me for clearly overstepping his bounds and authority. Until we get more people like Bob Jackson, there's always going to be and I can't remember what his last name was. First name was Ken. There was going to be Ken's in the world. And how do we get rid of the Ken's?

How do we convert the Ken's? We have to incentivize them on doing the right thing.

Matt Regusci: Yeah. And that's a really good point at converting the Ken's because.

We had a great conversation, Francine and I with Deborah Blum, and it's only been a hundred years since the pasteurized milk law and all that stuff, right?

And it's only been a decade since Food Safety Modernization Act, and our whole entire history of the human race didn't even know that pathogens existed until less than a couple hundred years ago, 150 years ago. So there's this multiple generations of food facilities that were that have been around before pasteurization even in some places.

And you have this culture of pounds, right? Of operations, pounds, profit, money. That's how they keep the lights on. That's how they do that. And so now we're trying to put this culture of food safety that has really In terms of what we do, like modern food safety, like HACCP that was very new to have 80s.

So we have multiple generations of people in the facilities that they're not thinking about food safety. And so either they need to retire and then the new generation comes in. Or their mindset needs to shift and change. What do you think is going to happen first?

Sharon Beals: I think we have to have a change of mindset.

I have a very dear friend, Kim Rice, whose dad was in food manufacturing, just as Kim is. And he always said, People, product, and the profit will follow. You take care of your people, take care of the product, and the profit will follow. And that's the mindset that I think, again, Maple Leaf Foods, great example of they've kept that for top of mind.

I wish I could bottle having a near death experience so that others would learn. You would think, you look at the headlines, but all too often, and this is something else I'm on a soapbox about, we're in the food business. We have to quit thinking about, Oh, that's a meat problem. That's a baby food problem. That's a produce problem. You know what? Sanitation is sanitation.

The slicer doesn't care if you slice cilantro or salami. It gets dirty the same way. And we have to, as a food industry, learn from other sectors that are doing things generally really well. You look at the healthy people. 2000 and 2010 and 2020 and 2030, 0157 numbers plummeted, Listeria numbers, current events notwithstanding, plummeted, Salmonella, we heard it yesterday from Sandra Eskin, Salmonella numbers haven't moved.

Poultry industry has done a lot, but Salmonella numbers haven't moved. Why is that? So what we measure gets done and we have to incentivize people to do the right thing when no one's watching.

Francine L Shaw: Everybody has this, it won't happen to me mentality until it does.

Sharon Beals: And I don't know how to fix the two most dangerous phrases.

We've always done it that way. And it couldn't happen here. Cause that's a fill in the blank somebody else's pathogen of concern.

Matt Regusci: And that may be where the incentive happens or the disincentive to having the issue or the, the pathogen in your product, because E. coli numbers have dropped. It's an adulterant.

Listeria numbers, they're an issue. If you have listeria, you need to recall your product. Salmonella is not an adulterant.

Sharon Beals: It is in. It looks like it's cooked, but it's not. Oh, right. And the agency wants to make it certain Syrah bars of concern. That's the whole Salmonella framework piece. They're still taking in comments.

I think Sandra said yesterday, they have 3000 comments and more are coming in because they've extended the comment period.

Matt Regusci: So interesting. Cause the media industry was like, we need to make this an adulteration. It's ruining our business.

Sharon Beals: Michael Taylor said it from a podium. It's declared an adulterant after Jack in the box.

That's how it got put into play. And the Current Meat Institute, then North American Meat Institute, I think, their board of directors years ago said food safety is not competitive and the industry really pulled together. And that's when I talk about, we're in the food industry. We all need to pull together.

Meetings like this, I feel like who snuck the meat and poultry gal into the mostly FDA types. Um, but we do need to learn from each other and we need to get off our snobbery of, well, I do produce, so therefore I shouldn't have to see anything that you guys are doing over there in meat and poultry and vice versa.

We all need to learn from each other and take those best practices to heart.

Matt Regusci: Particularly in the, so my, almost my whole entire career, I started in dairy and then moved over to produce and. The produce industry really, they're struggling with a lot of stuff, but sometimes they forget like, Oh, everything's the field.

Yeah, it is until it goes into the facility, right? And then it's not in the field anymore in that packing house or that processing plant. There's a lot to learn from the industry that has been doing food safety and processing, packing forever. The issue with produce is they're like, well, we don't, I don't know if we can really learn anything.

And I'm like, not only do you need to learn something, but they have a five log reduction. You can't cook bagged lettuce.

Sharon Beals: I think the leafy green people have done a great job with the testing in the fields and just they face the same thing that raw comminuted products face in the meat world is that there is no kill step except for, well, At least in the meat and poultry world, you're healthy and the consumer is cooking it to 160 or 165.

but Produce? Yeah, you're done. So, I applaud all the efforts that they have done.

Matt Regusci: Yeah. What has been the biggest change in food safety in your career? And what do you see as the biggest change over the next 20 years?

Sharon Beals: We've gotten better at testing methods. We're finding things. 0157 is an adulterant. We thought it was a needle in a haystack.

Within short order, we were able to pick up one cell in a pound of ground beef and found out it wasn't the needle in the haystack. The diagnostics continue to get better, and I think the reporting continues to get better so that we get out in front of these things. The testing methods have been a big change.

The Meat Institute's Listeria Workshop is going on, I think, 20 years now. In fact, it's going on this week. They hold it twice a year, and it's always sold out. I've asked them, I think you guys need to hold it more often. And I always invite people from cross sectional things. So I think the transparency that we have amongst ourselves and sharing is wonderful.

That's been a big change. Again, diagnostics have been a big change. I just don't want the lessons of the past to be forgotten. That's my fear. That's my fear.

Matt Regusci: Yeah. You were talking about that. So lessons that you're like yesterday, you're like colorfully said, did you ever forget what we learned with the Lysteria stuff?

Do you want to explain that a little bit?

Sharon Beals: Well, yeah. You look at the current events and you go, what in the heck is happening? And in talking to several of my colleagues, we've got a brain drain going on. So you think about it, people coming up into the space. I was so thrilled, the panel yesterday on traceability. Were any of them over 30? It was awesome. Enthusiastic. Just really engaged.

Matt Regusci: Andy Kennedy on that one? Was that the one that Andy Kennedy was?

Sharon Beals: Adam from FDA was on there. Alex from Chipotle was on that panel. It was just, it was very energizing. It was very gratifying to see a bunch of new faces. So passionate and engaged.

That's awesome.

But in talking to a, a colleague of mine the other day who has moved over to the sustainability world from food safety quality, she says, you know, I miss my team and I miss my plants, but what I don't miss is sitting in the car in the parking lot of the restaurant while the family's inside eating and I'm taking care of crisis du jour.

And we've all been there. I can't tell you the number of times I've been the person sitting in the car or at home and the family's looking at you through the window with, come on, hurry up, when is this going to be over? I think that's the biggest challenge for the next 20 years. How do we retain these folks in these roles and keep them. I mean, I'm 66, I'm not going to be around forever.

There's a lot of institutional knowledge, both in the industry and in the agencies. That's retiring and moving on. As long as I'm still able to, I'm doing my thing and helping out where I can. The biggest challenge I see is how are we going to continue to keep these folks, these young, very enthusiastic and passionate people, how are we going to keep them?

Because we need to keep them.

Matt Regusci: Yeah.

Francine L Shaw: We just had this conversation with Steve. about the retention in the industry, inspectors. We were talking about inspectors specifically.

Matt Regusci: Steve from AFDO.

Francine L Shaw: Yeah. And it's a problem.

Sharon Beals: It is a problem. And I'm not sure what the solution is other than that food safety quality manager shouldn't be the only one sitting in the car missing dinner with their family.

This afternoon, we're going to talk about risk assessment. And my first two points on proactive and reactive risk assessment is Who's your cross functional team? That's step number one. Get your cross functional team. This is not the responsibility of the food safety quality person in the room. You better have operations. You better have maintenance. You better have sanitation. You better have all the departments that can help solve the problem because everyone brings a different perspective.

Francine L Shaw: And shouldn't that be part of the food safety culture?

Sharon Beals: That should be part of the company culture.

Matt Regusci: Well, Amen. Together we're smarter.

Yes. Amen.

And you're so spot on and with the, my wife, so we've been in food safety my whole entire career. And I've known my wife since I was 15. So she's been with me the whole entire time. We had like, explains all the kids. Yeah. Explains all the kids.

There's moments of time at which we're together. So we have a bunch of people over during the Boar Head crisis thing when that really just came down and I'm not even really in that world anymore in terms of food compliance. At one point in time, my partner and I owned WQS, Akima Bot. We had 400 auditors all over the place, meat inspectors acting like the USDA in South America.

And during any major outbreak, we were like, Is it one of our facilities that we certified? No. Okay, good, which we never had one, which was awesome. Really good people. And then second was what are our other clients in the industry going to be dealing with? And so we would be talking with our other clients adjacent in the industry that this facility affects everything.

So if you have a food safety outbreak, it affects not just your facility, your company, but your whole entire category, right? Okay. And so we were out just trying to help all of our clients deal with it. Well, a lot of these people still call me when there's a big outbreak, like the Boar Head thing. And my wife is like to them, she's just so used to it.

She's like, yeah, I apologize that he's on his phone. Whenever there's an outbreak, he gets still involved. And I don't know if that is just instilled with people who are food safety career oriented people. I almost think if you've been doing this for 10, 20 years, most of the time you're pulling your sleeves up and you're getting right in the middle of that crisis.

Even if it's not your crisis, you're trying to help other people.

Sharon Beals: So a colleague and I talked about this morning, here's what upset me about the whole Boar's Head situation and now we've got Bruce Pack and waffles and all those things. If you've never stepped foot in a plant or been responsible for a plant, be quiet.

No, I'm serious. The number of people that have pontificated and speculated and cursed out all these various entities when they've never been responsible for a processing plant. Some of them have never worked in food. Thank you. Just shut up. First, pray for the victims and their families. Second, make sure your own house is in order.

And then three, when the root cause comes out, take it to heart. We need to be supporting each other. I was not there when Maple Leaf, the Maple Leaf crisis occurred. It still chokes me up because. People lost their lives. And my neighbor was the head of operations through that. And Steve can't, I don't know how I would have gotten through it.

I believe firmly with every fiber of my soul. Everybody came into work at Boar's Head every day to do the right thing. At least what they thought was the right thing. These people have suffered and to just be publicly vilifying the whole entire organization when people lost their jobs, people have lost lives.

It's just not productive. We need to be shoring people up. Sharing and helping and people who have never to your point, Francine, have never been in a food plant speculating. It's like, why? You're not making the situation any better.

Matt Regusci: Wow. And when you say choked up, you're serious about it. Like you're tearing up right now.

It's just, it's This is where, when you're talking about the future of food safety, I think that those people who are coming into the pipe and they're learning from people like you, those people that really have that same passion that you do, those are the ones that are going to be here for the long run, and it's how do we get enough people to really believe in that food safety, in their job. And it's just beautiful to see you talking about it.

And what are your thoughts on that? Like, cause so many people coming into food safety, I see, and I'm, I'm being general right now, but it's a job or it's a next step in the career. And how do you see us retaining those people and really turning that mindset to a, this is a passion. This is a goal I'm helping Americans and the world have a food product that is safe, healthy, nutritious, and I'm changing the world every day that I show up into work, my little bit is monumental in the contribution of saving lives. How do you see that?

Francine L Shaw: Just, I had a thought.

I think that sometimes when we come to these conferences, I understand how you feel. Because one of the conversations, and I don't cry often, though.

Matt Regusci: You're crying more often in podcasts though, I think we're getting to the point now.

Francine L Shaw: It's I do this because I care. It isn't to get rich. We talk about that frequently.

And we had a conversation with Bill Marler and sometimes I just wonder, is it like this just futile, you know what I mean? Because I feel like I'm beating my head against the wall sometimes because people start dying and it's my God, what the hell am I doing? Because I feel like people don't listen sometimes, you know what I mean?

I get so damn frustrated. And I'm not specifically talking about Boar's Head, just in general, because sometimes you try to talk to people and they're just like. We don't have a problem and you know they have a problem, but they don't want to listen. And like I said, I get so frustrated. Sometimes I think of these conferences, we come and we listen to the regulatory, which is important.

And sometimes it's a bunch of the same information from conference to conference. And Darin Detwiler does an excellent job of talking about his personal situation, which is important. But I think if we had more people talk about why they do what they do that have been in the industry, such as yourself and myself included, we do it because we care and we don't want people to get sick and it matters and it makes a difference and we need people in the industry that are in the industry for the right reasons to educate and to help to lead others. I don't know.

Sharon Beals: Yeah.

I mean, these conferences. Where are the other departments I talked about, your cross functional team? We're preaching to the choir at these conferences.

Matt Regusci: Wow, that is so true.

Sharon Beals: So at the Food Safety Summit earlier this year, there was a young man in the audience asked a question about sanitation.

I said, well, when was the last time you spent the night with the sanitation crew? And he looked at me like I had three heads. So I asked the audience, I said, who's from John Butts and I have spent the night with sanitation crew? If there were 10 hands that went up. At the food safety conference that the institute, Media Institute, just held, someone on a panel I was running asked that same question to the audience, a smaller crowd.

Every hand in the room, except those that are not responsible for plants, went up. It's like, have you spent the night with your sanitation crew? To show that you care and to make sure stuff's getting done.

Francine L Shaw: So I used to spend the night when I wrote about this in my book. You know, I thought everybody did this.

I would spend the night. We'd have cleaning parties and I wouldn't ask anybody to do anything that I didn't do. If I wanted them to scrub the drain. With a brush? I scrubbed the drain with a brush. It was like, that's just what we did. We would have pizza parties and spend the night. What we did, because it was important.

And if it was important to them, it needed to be important to me. And you lead by example. I think those are the stories that need to be told, and those are some of the things that we need to talk about. Who's coming to the conferences, and who are we talking to, and who do we want to invite, and who do we want to bring in, and that's how we make a difference.

Do you agree?

Sharon Beals: Yeah, no, I, like I said, you look around, who's in attendance? We're preaching to the choir. What I hope people get out of these conferences is they get something new and different to bring back. So I've asked for a flip chart for my room later this afternoon. I should have thought of this at the start of the conference.

So I asked, can we get a flip chart? And I want everybody to write their favorite niche or favorite Like, where do you go at pre op to find something? Think about the collective brainpower that we've got walking around here. I bet you people are going to have a, I never thought about looking there. I never thought about looking there.

I'm hoping that we get a nice collection of, have you looked here? And just share that type of knowledge. So you hope that the folks that are coming here, yes, they're already, they've drunk the Kool Aid, so to speak. But do they come back with some new tool in their box that they then get ... they are able to use and deploy.

That was one of the beauties of the conversation yesterday from the, that

Francine L Shaw: presenter.

Sharon Beals: Yeah. So the Listeria presentation yesterday, it was just good, solid things to do. Some really easy, quick wins, things you can do in your facility to get rid of the niches and get rid of the biofilms and move on down the road.

That's the type of stuff that you hope people are coming back with and they can, they're easy and they can get implemented.

Matt Regusci: You're talking about not having, here we're at a food safety conference, so there's a bunch of corporate people at the food safety, but not like operations people, but a bunch of corporate food safety people at this food safety conference.

When Andy Kennedy and I were, were, When I was at New Era Partners and iFoodDS with them, we were talking about FSMA 204 and traceability. So we were pitching, I had my marketing team pitching out to the different conferences, the operations conferences, the distribution conferences, the all that stuff, um, about, Hey, FSMA 204, the trace of that new FDA traceability rules coming up, these people run operations.

They're probably going to be interested in it. And they said, no, we're not interested in food safety. Our people aren't interested in food safety. And I thought, well, first off, it's not just food safety, which they should be interested in. It's literally traceability. Product coming in, product coming out.

That is operations. They should be interested in this new FDA rule. Yeah, we're not interested. Have you guys talk. We just think that they'd be, nah, we're not interested. And so you're absolutely correct. It's not just the food safety conferences that just attract the food safety people, but it's all the other conferences that attract the different C suite people of the different roles within the food industry, they don't even have conferences together and talks together where they could learn what, how do you fix that or is there a fix to that?

Sharon Beals: So have you tried women in manufacturing? No. Try women in manufacturing. Now, it's all sectors in the manufacturing world, but Again, smart people look at what other sectors in manufacturing are doing, and hey, can I apply that to what I'm doing?

Does traceability apply to non food things? Sure it does. There's recalls on things that are mechanical. Why wouldn't traceability be appealing to somebody like that?

Matt Regusci: Traceability is just moving things through a supply chain, so anything that has a supply chain has traceability, that's true.

Sharon Beals: That's right. So I would try women in manufacturing. I can hook you up.

Matt Regusci: Uh, women just in general, y'all were able to link everything together. You need more women in C suite.

Francine L Shaw: We're superior.

Sharon Beals: We see things differently. We manage generally. These are all general. We talk in general, yeah. Right. Yeah. So. We think differently, we manage differently, and that's why I say together we're smarter. So, early days of HACCP 1996, I'm working for IVP, then the biggest, baddest meatpacker on the planet. And as we're going through hazard analysis, there should be blood on the floor because you and operations have one view of things, the maintenance guy's got another view, quality food safety people have a third view.

And through working, everybody getting their piece out on the table and wrestling it to the ground, you come up with a really good hazard analysis and HACCP plan. You can't do a HACCP plan or hazard analysis by the HACCP coordinator sitting in their cubicle. It just doesn't work that way. That's why you have to have that cross functionality.

Diversity of thought as well as of action. Diversity of thought is crucial. Our workforce should reflect our population.

Matt Regusci: Yeah, very cool. Our workforce should reflect our population. That is absolutely true.

Francine L Shaw: Can I use that? I like that. It's true. Why wouldn't it?

Matt Regusci: So it's the simplicity of it is fascinating for why it is profound.

Sharon Beals: I've caught you flat footed and speechless. Wow. Yeah. My mission's accomplished.

Francine L Shaw: Yeah. I'm really speechless. I might be twice in two days. Somebody did that yesterday.

Matt Regusci: Okay. So you have your pu pu platter going on. And now that you are on your own doing consult, how long have you been doing that for?

February. Oh, so this is like, yeah, this is all new this year. All right. So do you have time for other clients if anybody is interested in hiring you? I do. Awesome. How would they get ahold of you? SKKBills at Outlook. com.

Sharon Beals: There you go. I'm the only Sharon KK Bills in all of LinkedIn.

Matt Regusci: Well, until my son opens up a LinkedIn account, I'm also the only Matthew Regusci on LinkedIn.

Sharon Beals: There you go. Well, that's how you reach me. And yes, definitely open for business, open to help because it doesn't hurt just the organization that's suffering through whatever the event is, hurts the category, hurts the food business. My husband sent me a picture of, we still get a newspaper, we're old, okay?

I start with the comics. Like with paper. Like paper. Which unfortunately the sports page is all about the Cowboys and we're Bears fans in our house. Anyway, he sent me a picture of the article where Ben Chapman was talking about consumers losing their faith in the food safety systems. So it made the Dallas Morning News.

Oh, wow. And that's frightening to me. We've worked so hard. We've worked so damn hard to really live up to the safest food supply. And current events are, they're frightening. Yeah, they are frightening.

So to your earlier question, Francine, I hope that everyone takes all the recent events. There was the soy milk thing in Canada.

There's, there's been plenty, right? And in fact, talking to Larry Keener about next year's food safety summit, let's do a retrospective because he said he used the Tylenol example in a, in a class and nobody knew what he was talking about. And it was like, wow.

Francine L Shaw: I saw that too. And I was like.

Sharon Beals: So Tylenol, Jalisco cheese list goes on and on.

And who was it that said those that don't remember history are doomed to repeat it? Yeah. I forget who said that. Somebody.

Matt Regusci: I think it's been said for a long time,

Sharon Beals: but Socrates. So we don't know Socrates. There we go. So we're going to have that as a session next year. Here's the retrospective.

Matt Regusci: I learned about the Tylenol case through a true crime thing, not like a, are we talking about the one where the guy was like manipulating the stock market and putting, yeah, I learned about that.

Well, it was, no, he was shorting the stock. He was putting like poison in the Tylenol. Yeah, he was poisoning the Tylenol. But how they found him was they, he shorted the stock. And so he was doing it on purpose to then have an outbreak with Tylenol to then have Tylenol stock drop, he shorted the stock before he did that.

And then he told some friends to do the exact same. So it's short of the stock and that's how the cheaters never prosper. So I didn't learn about it in a food safety thing. I learned about it because I was curious, true crime stuff, but yeah, that would, that'd be a fast thing. So this is, you're gonna do this next year.

Sharon Beals: Yeah. That the food safety summit. So we put that on the agenda of let's do a retrospective of all the things that we've come through. Because we worked really hard.

Matt Regusci: Okay.

Well, we have two more questions for you.

Francine L Shaw: So what is it that you like about this conference? And what would you change? Or what don't you?

Sharon Beals: Honest to God, this is the first time I've ever been to this conference. Oh, really? Yes. So Donna invited me to sit on a panel and I said, what, you want the token meat and poultry gal out there? She's like, yeah, kind of, sorta. You bring a very different perspective. So honestly, I have, like I said, I really enjoyed the panel on traceability, looking at all those fresh faces. This has been, got to catch up with some old colleagues, meet some new friends. It's been good.

Francine L Shaw: And what would you change? The escalator?

Sharon Beals: Yes. The broken escalator. So, I mean, my, it's N equal one for a sample size. Equal one for a sample size. So, I'll have to give that some thought. I did promise Donna that I would fill out the survey because I think so, so whenever you hold a meeting, surveys are critical. Good, bad and ugly.

Right? Because how do you get better?

Matt Regusci: Right? You're very big on measuring things, which is very awesome. It doesn't get measured. That's right. That's right. Well, thank you so much. And Francine and I have a little bit more advice for you. Don't eat poop.