Meet Jonathan M. Gardner, IDFA's HACCP Expert
Jonathan Gardner, IDFA Vice President, Regulatory Affairs and International Standards
IDFA is the industry leader in providing comprehensive training for dairy and juice HACCP compliance. Jonathan M. Gardner, IDFA vice president of regulatory affairs and international standards, directs all aspects of IDFA's HACCP Certification Program.
IDFA has helped to provide the dairy industry perspective to federal and state agencies as they developed their dairy and juice HACCP regulations. IDFA also helped federal and state government auditors to develop their dairy and juice HACCP training programs and materials. These government training programs use some of the training materials, forms and practical tools incorporated in IDFA's Advanced Dairy and Juice HACCP Workshop.
A longtime food-safety expert, Gardner also oversees product-safety and quality-control issues, as well as federal and state regulatory affairs, and participates in International Dairy Federation committees and the National Conference on Interstate Milk Shipments (NCIMS).
Before joining IDFA, he worked for many years at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. While at FDA, Gardner served for eight years as a consumer safety officer on the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (CFSAN) Grade "A" Milk Safety Team. In this position, he focused on regulatory issues involving the Pasteurized Milk Ordinance (PMO) and served on several NCIMS committees, including the Third-Party Certification Pilot Program Committee, the Technical Review Committee and the Heating and Cooling Section Review Committee.
Most recently, Gardner worked in FDA's Division of Human Resource Development as the lead training officer for Grade "A" dairy and aseptic processing courses. He also led courses on environmental sampling, Good Manufacturing Practices (GMPs) for food, food-safety management at retail and veterinary-medicine training.
Before joining FDA, Gardner worked as an environmental health specialist for the Virginia Department of Health, where he served as the liaison between the department and other state and federal agencies involved in food and dairy regulation. He inspected Grade "A" dairy processing facilities and regularly validated the processing equipment for a variety of pasteurization systems.
Based in Washington, D.C., IDFA and its constituent organizations - the Milk Industry Foundation, the National Cheese Institute, and the International Ice Cream Association - have been an integral part of the dairy industry for more than 100 years. IDFA has long played a key role in assisting the dairy industry with its food safety and HACCP needs, helping federal and state regulatory agencies efforts to modernize their food-safety standards and regulations.
For more information, contact IDFA's meetings registrar at (202) 220-3557 or info@idfahaccp.org.
