Gale Prince brings over 50 years of food industry experience to the table since his graduation in 1967 from Iowa State University. His career started at the Jewel Companies and continued until his retirement from The Kroger Co. as its Director of Corporate Regulatory Affairs. He is widely known as a pioneer in food safety science for his involvement in industry and regulatory activities, and in addressing global food safety issues. He has been called “The Dean of Product Recalls,” having managed several thousand product recalls in his career and is noted for his knowledge of food safety and regulatory requirements.
In 2015, Gale received the International Association of Food Protection / IAFP’s Lifetime Achievement Award for his contributions to food safety and was awarded the Federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Special Citation Award for leadership in biosecurity and food safety in protecting the nation’s food supply. His leadership in advancing food safety science has led to many other awards over the course of his career.
Because of his extensive knowledge and experience, Gale has been frequently quoted in news and trade publications on matters of food safety science and has been asked to testify as a subject matter expert in numerous court proceedings. His expertise has been recognized by the U.S. regulatory agencies, and he has been asked to serve as a subject matter expert on various food safety and regulatory task projects.
Gale has also served on various food trade associations’ technical committees due to his broad knowledge and visionary expertise in fulfilling consumer expectations for food safety science.
He has served as a subject matter expert for several task groups working under federal contracts dealing with food safety science. These included task groups working on the science of temperature requirements for potentially hazardous food, bioterrorism and food safety, and traceability of food products.
He was instrumental in developing the first food manager certification program for the retail food store manager called “Management Uniformity Sanitation Training (MUST).” This was followed by a training program called “The Invisible Challenge” that has been extensively used by the entire retail food industry.
Gale has been involved in the Conference of Food Protection (CFP) since its beginning in 1971 and in the development of the FDA Food Code. He has attended the biennial conference ever since that time and has served on the science and technology council for a number of years. He has also served as the chairman of that CFP council for several years.
Gale Prince has given approximately 1,000 presentations on food safety science in his career. He has been invited to speak on food safety science in 45 of the 50 US states and six of the ten Canadian provinces. Gale has spoken at food safety meetings in Europe, Asia, New Zealand, and South America (Chile and Argentina), as well.
He has travelled millions of miles to share his knowledge with people around the world in advancing food safety.
