Dr. David Acheson is the President and CEO of the Acheson Group; David has had a long and distinguished career in the food industry, probably best known for his work with the FDA where he held several positions including Associate Commissioner for Foods, which gave him an agency-wide leadership role for all food and feed issues, including health promotion and nutrition.

After his time with the FDA, Dr. Acheson was a partner at Leavitt Partners and managed Leavitt Partners Global Food Safety Solutions. In 2013 he founded The Acheson Group, a consulting firm which provides strategic advice as well as recall and crisis management support to food companies and ancillary technology companies on a global basis on all matters relating to food safety and food defense.

Dr. Acheson works with many food and beverage companies globally to assist them in managing the complexity of modern food safety. This includes both well-established global companies as well as technology providers, startup businesses, and private equity firms.

Dr. Ben Katchman leads the research and development of sample preparation and assay development at PathogenDx, a Scottsdale, AZ-based company which provides disruptive DNA-based pathogen testing technology and solutions for the cannabis, botanical, food, and agricultural industries.

Prior to joining PathogenDx, Dr. Katchman was a Principle Investigator at Eccrine Systems, where he led all clinical research, regulatory pathway implementation, assay development, and biomarker studies. He was also the co-founder of FlexBioTech, where he led the development of novel OLED-based molecular diagnostic assay platforms. Dr. Katchman received a Bachelor of Science degree in Microbiology, from Indiana University before carrying out graduate research at Arizona State University.

In this BONUS episode of Food Safety Matters, we speak to Dr. David Acheson and Ben Katchman, Ph.D. about:

• Environmental monitoring through the regulatory lens and the advent of the 'Swabathon'
• Root causes of microbiological contamination in processing plants
• David Acheson describes what impressed him about PathogenDxs' solutions
• Overview of EnviroX-F technology
• Time and cost savings associated with a single test solution
• Shifting the science of food safety from microbiology to molecular biology techniques
• The critical role of environmental monitoring managing risk in food processing

Sponsored by:

PathogenDx

For more information on PathogenDx's simple, powerful and inexpensive DNA-based pathogen testing, visit www.pathogendx.com.