A new chapter for global food safety: welcoming Elizabeth Andoh-Kesson as GFSI Director

We are incredibly proud to announce Elizabeth Andoh-Kesson’s promotion to Director, the Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI) .

Ms. Andoh-Kesson will continue to use her deep expertise in global food safety to drive our core strategic objectives, including benchmarking, public private partnership and food safety capacity building.

To mark this new chapter, we sat down to discuss her professional journey, the milestones achieved during this vital transitional period, and her bold vision for future-proofing global food safety systems over the next decade.

Q1. Could you share a bit about your professional journey and what makes the GFSI mission so personally meaningful to you?

My journey in food safety actually started with a qualification in Food Science and Nutrition. From there, my path took me through quite a few different corners of our industry—from managing technical and legislative standards, to leading food safety policy at the British Retail Consortium, and later responsibility for food safety compliance at Waitrose & Partners. Looking back, every single one of those roles was really about the same fundamental challenge: how do we build trust, drive best practices, and make complex systems actually work for the frontline workers in retail and food production.

Throughout that time, GFSI was always a subject of key interest for me. So, when the opportunity came to join the team in October 2024, it felt like a natural next step. I was already completely aligned with the strategic priorities and deeply committed to our mission of improving the integrity of food safety audits globally.

What makes this mission so personally meaningful to me goes far beyond the technicalities of benchmarking. It’s the people. I am constantly encouraged by the sheer scale of voluntary commitment from busy, senior leaders across our global network who give up their time to make the system better. At the end of the day, we all share one non-negotiable goal: supporting the delivery of safe food to people everywhere. To now lead this incredible community and help shape where we go next is both an immense privilege and a responsibility I take very seriously.

Q2. You’ve been guiding GFSI through a vital transitional period. What has been the most rewarding part of keeping the organisation’s strategic priorities on track over the past year?

For us, this period has focused on the practical side of our work. Version 2024 of GFSI’s Benchmarking Requirements was actually published right before I stepped into this role late 2024. The highlight of the past year has been working with our key stakeholders to help operationalise these new requirements.

GFSI is, by its very nature, an industry-driven initiative. We don’t operate in a vacuum; we are constantly working together with the ecosystem at large. A massive part of that has been facilitating open dialogue through our working groups and stakeholder forums, which culminated in some fantastic workshop sessions at the 2026 GFSI Conference in Vancouver. We really treated the conference as a giant, ongoing conversation, a space where we could tackle the tough realities of moving from reactive food safety to a truly proactive, preventive model. 

A key focus of this conversation was our Guidance Document. We’ve put a lot of work into refining it to ensure it acts as a clear, practical roadmap to help Certification Program Owners (CPOs) smoothly demonstrate their alignment with the new BMRs. Helping to demystify that process for our stakeholders has been incredibly fulfilling.

To ensure we maintain this momentum, we’ve also focused on strengthening our leadership. I am absolutely delighted that we have welcomed five new members to our Steering Committee over the past year. Expanding the committee to bring in these highly respected, forward-thinking minds from food retailers and manufacturers is a clear reflection of our commitment to our strategic priorities. Having such diverse and progressive voices step up to guide our path ensures that GFSI remains robust, relevant, and deeply connected to the day-to-day realities of global supply chains.

Q3. If you look ahead five or ten years from now, what do you hope your lasting impact on GFSI will be, and what will you be most proud to look back on?

When I look down the road five or ten years, I want to look back and know that we didn’t just keep the wheels turning, but that we truly future-proofed GFSI. For me, that legacy boils down to three major, transformative shifts. 

First, we have to tackle the digital and data frontier. The audit space is rapidly changing, and at GFSI, we are actively defining how we can be most useful to the industry in this digital evolution as we look toward future versions of our Benchmarking Requirements. The real priority is making sure that food safety doesn’t get left behind in the tech transition and that we’re supporting businesses in reaping what those advancements can contribute to food safety. We need to ensure our requirements reflect a world where data-driven insights and digital tools are part of the daily reality of food safety management. 

Second, through our capability-building work—particularly our Global Markets Programme (GMaP)—we have a massive opportunity to be a pivotal point in a new food business’s journey toward certification. Our vision is ‘safe food for people everywhere,’ and that means we want everyone in the food world, from small local producers to large-scale manufacturers, to benefit from a robust, structured system. It shouldn’t feel out of reach; it should feel like a clear, supported path. 

And third, in the space of public-private partnerships, I want to see us move beyond high-level discussions into highly practical, everyday integration. We already see fantastic examples of this—for instance, the Canadian food safety authorities use certification against GFSI-recognised programmes as a risk assessment tool during the official inspection process. I want to see that kind of approach spread and be officially incorporated into regulatory policies worldwide. 

If we can bridge the gap between public oversight and private assurance, make digital integration a reality, and lift up smaller businesses along the way, I’ll be incredibly proud of the lasting impact we’ve made.