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Here at Amazon’s Seattle headquarters, we’re all looking forward to welcoming the GFSI Conference to our home city. Seattle is the perfect place to host a global food safety rendezvous — not only do we have a great food scene, but we’ve established ourselves as a vibrant tech hub and a hotbed of disruption. We’re planning to bring that disruptive spirit to the forefront in Plenary 5 and its linked breakout sessions. Even the structure will be innovative: we’ll be trying out an all-new, interactive breakout format like nothing that has ever before been seen at the GFSI Conference. Something great is sure to come out of that dynamic atmosphere, and you’ll have to be there to take part!
Glimpse the future of food safety through Amazon case studies
At Amazon, we take pride in standing at the leading edge of retail technology. You’ll experience this first-hand if you join a Discovery Tour, which will give you a backstage pass to some of our most technologically advanced worksites: the BFI4 Fulfillment Center, where robots and humans work side by side, and the fully-automated convenience store Amazon Go.
The showcase will continue at Plenary 5. We’ll share some of the innovations that help keep food safe at Amazon, including machine learning, natural language processing, optical character recognition and blockchain. More than mere buzzwords, these tools help us process large amounts of data and make quick, effective decisions when we face complex challenges. For example, we’re piloting optical character recognition to train machines to conduct label reviews, saving time and enabling us to process higher volumes of information. We also use natural language processing in conjunction with customer feedback monitoring to build models that can predict risk for products — even before a serious food safety issue occurs.
If there’s one fact we want attendees to take home from this information-packed session, it’s that technology is for everyone, not just for tech companies like Amazon. We hope to demystify the hot topics in food safety tech and help you envision ways to apply them in your own workplace.
Join the ‘sharks’ in the all-new Shark Tank
To learn how emerging food safety technologies are actively changing the industry, look no further than the three concurrent Breakout Sessions that follow Plenary 5. For the first time in GFSI history, we’ll be using these sessions to host a business presentation competition, à la Shark Tank or Dragon’s Den.
A total of nine cutting-edge companies will take the stage to pitch their concepts to a panel of experts — ‘sharks’ — who are well-placed to judge their value for the industry. We selected the nine competitors from a large pool of applicants based on their innovative spirit, disruptive potential and feasibility. These aren’t sci-fi visions of the distant future: they’re tangible tools that have been shown to work on the ground.
Join the conversation and you too can be a shark! Attendees will have the chance to vote for their favourite presenter, and the winner will be recognised during the final plenary of the conference. Don’t miss your chance to help predict the next evolution in food safety technology.
This post was written and contributed by:
Anthony Auffray
Director, Global Product/Food Safety and Compliance
Amazon, USA
GFSI Conference 2020 Committee Member
Carletta Ooton
Vice President, Safety, Sustainability, Security and Compliance
Amazon, USA
GFSI Board Member & GFSI Conference 2020 Committee Member
