The inaugural “Cultivate: Leadership Growth Lab” will be held November 5–6, 2026, in Lexington, Kentucky. The two-day, collaborative event is designed to meet the food production sector’s need for leadership development.
Once seen primarily as compliance enforcers, QA teams are now expected to be strategic business partners, shaping food safety culture, driving skills development, and leveraging risk and data analytics to enable continuous improvement.
The session “Breaking Silos, Breaking Bias—Real Collaboration in Food Safety,” taking place on May 13 during the upcoming Food Safety Summit, will candidly discuss why cross-sector collaboration often falls short and offer practical solutions for breaking down barriers.
The meeting, taking place June 21–24 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, includes the first-ever Applied Dairy Foods track, a specialized program designed to equip dairy food professionals with science-driven, real-world strategies.
NEHA Thrive provides practical leadership tools alongside science-informed strategies for managing stress, burnout, and long-term career sustainability while helping strengthen leadership capacity, improve communication and decision-making, and reinforce resilience.
The educational series comprises four distinct food safety events taking place across the U.S. to help address the nut industry’s diverse challenges through networking, professional development, and knowledge-sharing.
The opportunity is open to current graduate students. Project areas may include research on reducing heavy metals and toxic elements and on frameworks to identify indicators of high-quality science.
