How We Grow

2020 July/Aug How We Grow

Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/1268831

Contents of this Issue

Navigation

Page 12 of 23

ALMOND COMMUNITY Almond Board of California 12 Drug Administration to approve a heart health claim 1 for almonds and other tree nuts in August of 2003. "I'll never forget the day we got the news," Lapsley said. "We were in the middle of the Institute of Food Technologists' conference in Chicago, sitting in a hotel room with Stacey Humble and the Porter Novelli team." "The wait for the FDA's decision about the health claim petition seemed never- ending, and the nutrition and marketing committees and teams spent their time planning for the most likely scenarios," remembers Stacey Humble of Robert's Ferry Nut Company, who led ABC marketing at the time. "When at long last the notice came, we were ready to roll. We ran full-page ads in USA Today and the New York Times within three days. The collaboration between the nutrition and marketing programs at that time is something Karen and I have always been very proud of." In 2015, Lapsley hired Swati Kalgaonkar, Ph.D., to take on day-to-day oversight of ABC's Nutrition Research program. Kalgaonkar will lead the program going forward as part of the newly combined Research and Innovation Department. Shifting to food safety The elation of the heart health victory lasted less than a year before the California almond industry faced a Salmonella outbreak in June of 2004, the second in three years. Lapsley's experience managing food research teams at Agri-Food Canada came in handy as the industry responded to the crisis, which coincidentally crossed the border into Canada. As U.S. and Canadian officials traced the illnesses to almonds grown in California, Lapsley worked with fellow Canadian Linda Harris, Ph.D., at the University of California, Davis, to pull together existing research on Salmonella in orchards and secured a $1 million grant from the USDA to conduct additional research. Lapsley also established a Technical Expert Review Panel (TERP) to assess pasteurization equipment and technology, laying the groundwork for the mandatory pasteurization program for Salmonella reduction and implementation of best practices, including Good Agricultural Practices (GAPs) for growers and Good Manufacturing Practices (GMPs) for processors, as well as updated Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point (HACCP) guidelines and Pathogen Environmental Monitoring (PEM) resources. During this time, the Almond Board brought on Guangwei Huang and Tim Birmingham, Ph.D., who lead almond quality and food safety programs at the Almond Board today. Weird and wonderful Having successfully tackled major challenges in nutrition and food safety, Lapsley took on an exciting new area of 1 Scientific evidence suggests, but does not prove, that eating 1.5 ounces of most nuts, such as almonds, as part of a diet low in saturated fat and cholesterol may reduce the risk of heart disease. One serving on almonds (28g) has 13g of unsaturated fat and only 1g of saturated fat. In 2013, Lapsley (left) attended a nutrition conference in Granada, Spain, along with ABC-funded researcher Seema Gulati, Ph.D. (middle), who leads the National Diabetes, Obesity and Cholesterol Foundation in India, and current Vice Chair of ABC's Nutrition Research Committee Maggie Moon, who is the senior director of Nutrition Communications at The Wonderful Company. "Karen's contribution to the industry does not just represent scientific achievements that were the integral factor in cementing almonds as the number one nut in the world, but she also set all of us on the incredible endeavor of discovery towards the realization of the almond orchard of the future." — Richard Waycott Continue on page 13

Articles in this issue

Archives of this issue

view archives of How We Grow - 2020 July/Aug How We Grow