Rick Biros
Appearances
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
food safety issue you're talking about borishead and you know they they had issues in the plant that were just being ignored is it the same with cider you know if you're not really paying attention to this then that's potentially negligence Correct.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
Having lived through three teenagers, four teenagers. Oh, yeah, that's a lot. There were three years of COVID, too.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
The first year was good. The second year, I think people were kind of burnt out with everything being.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
Plus, the industry went through some weird times with structuring. Yeah. Trying to do audits virtually and sure about that. Reduction in enforcement from FDA.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
I don't know what my favorite food is because I like lots of food.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
like who was what's the demographic for attendance like what kind of jobs do they have and i'm saying this because i want i want my cyber security side of the listener house to hear this because they you're included so well the primary persona of a person attending is going to be a mid to senior level food safety and quality assurance these people are not learning food safety 101.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
at very entry-level type of training. This is more for senior level folks coming for information on food policy, what's going on in Washington, degree of new technology that's introduced, certainly regulatory compliance issues and best practices, learning. Sometimes it's just good to hear and share experiences.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
yeah for sure equally learn anything new it either helps person understand that they're not experiencing something unique and that many other people are experiencing those challenges or that there may actually be doing better you did um you did round tables last year and i sat on a couple and i've learned so much
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
I'm very blessed with my wife, my partner, who is an absolutely phenomenal cook. And I've been told many times that I'm just a very lucky man. I get really great meals three times a day. So favorite, yeah, there's some things that I like, but let's put it this way. Let's reverse this. There's very few things I don't like. That's what I come down to.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
When we first started doing the consortium, we actually had a gentleman from the Division of Homeland Security request to speak at the consortium. And the topic was on food defense. It was really more about insider threats, almost like a disgruntled employee. Yeah, insider threats, yeah. Now it's about cybersecurity attacks.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
How does things like cybersecurity actually translate into issues of food safety? What it really comes down to is that the mid and larger size food companies are becoming more dependent on technology. I mean, the reality of it is this business is a high volume, low margin business. That's right. squeeze a little bit more on the margin because it's so high volume that it doesn't impact.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
In addition to that, from a regulatory compliance issue, you're having things like FSMA 204, which is a traceability issue. You can't do that in any quick time without really utilizing technology.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
Well, you know, it actually, nor has it really been broadcast in the industry that much.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
There's been A little bit of a disconnect, in my opinion, on some of the conferences, ours, as well as other ones out there, have had the topic of service. You know, this one presentation that I sat in on was talking about changing your passwords. I'm like, really? You know, don't open up suspect-looking emails. I mean, that goes without saying. Make money with a Gmail account.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
But you asked the second question, which was food experience. That I have an answer. Okay. Actually, my wife and I were traveling in Europe on business. And we were in Brussels. And we ended up going to a restaurant called Truffes du Noir. Okay. It was on the very northern part of the city. And a restaurant that had everything on the menu had truffles. The experience was unbelievable.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
I think the opportunity lies with probably coming from the cybersecurity world into actually explaining to the food companies what the plans are. Yeah, I agree. There's threats to food companies from cyber attack that are not related to the safety of the others. Uh-huh. Ransom, chip anything. We've got your customer database. We've got this. We've got that. Right.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
Actually, what I think would be helpful is more and more examples, potential food safety and quality issues that could happen as a result of a cyber attack. So I learned about this one company that had programmable logic controllers.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
Their patches and fixes were available on the internet with no password, mainly on secure websites for a major company that was flying. So what if that was hacked? What if that was even replaced? What if that website, it could cause, you know, by having all the valves controlled differently than they should be, it could wreak major havoc and potentially cause a food safety threat.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
So, and if that led to some form of a malicious intent on the food company that led to a food safety problem that led to potential injuries or deaths all the way back. And I think that's an area that is completely under-discussed.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
Some companies even don't. I think that would be those topics or cited examples of a cyber attack on a company and specifically how that relates to safety and quality would be important and also the financial impact to that company. They couldn't even be viewed as liable for this because they didn't put enough safety measures in to prevent that from happening.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
You know, it seems all like a regular food safety issue. You were talking about Boar's Head and, you know, they had issues in the plant that were just being ignored. Is it the same with cider? You know, if you're not really paying attention to this, then that's potentially negligence. Correct. So, and if that led to some form of a malicious intent on the food company,
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
that led to a food safety problem that led to potential injuries or deaths all the way back. And I think that's an area that is completely under discussed.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
Not only was the food good, but the experience itself was. We just happened to be served by the owner of the restaurant. Love that. And he explained everything to us, and he had... Both kinds of truffles. And even he, when we ordered a bottle of wine, we relied on his recommendation. But then he handled the wine, which I'd never seen before. I actually had no idea what he was doing.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
We actually introduced a last minute new session for the consortium specifically on this. The original session was on root cause analysis. presenter, and it's changing around, but what she's doing is researching the USDA record.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
There's not everything that's going to be available to her by October 21st, but what is available publicly, they're going to be looking at, reviewing, and discussing, and how for attendees to potentially avoid those problems. How did this happen? Was this a sort of a bystander effect? Everyone thought in the plant, well, someone must be dealing with it.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
So no one actually raised a flag and said, this is a problem. At the same time, USDA had a, you know, they brought this up, you know, they're in the plant, they're seeing this, they brought up concerns about this, but it wasn't being addressed by anything, just polar inspectors. Yeah.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
But we don't know all the facts. To your point though, it was a food safe culture, one that prevented people from sneaking up. So therefore, one could construe that as being righteous. Certainly, Marler must be representing one or more.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
So I had to ask and he explained. having the pouring the wine from the bottle over the candle with the neck of the bottle being heated by the candle into a decanter does something extra to open up the wine and have it blossom and boy was he right. Yeah. Probably never spent that much money on a dinner.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
People didn't have to die. People didn't have to get sick and people did not have to lose their jobs.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
an opportunity for Horsehead to really try and grab hold of the situation. There are times where really bad things happen. It really depends on how the food company, specifically the food company to manage, supports food safety and quality assurance people on how to address this.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
So, actually in Virginia, Sabra Dipping Sauce had two big outbreaks years ago. And then? The Director of Food Safety is Rob Mamoson. Rob actually spoke at the consortium, and he was, and it was interesting, he had his corporate attorney sitting next to him, and usually those are the ones that tell you to shut up, don't say anything. You can't do this, you can only do that.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
By advice of our counsel, I emerged befriending from comment. Now, they both just put everything out on the table and discussed how bad they screwed up and what they were doing about, what they did to fix it.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
They were an open book and, you know, people, I heard back, you know, this is probably one of those moments that where I heard back that, you know, someone just could not believe how open and honest and genuine they were.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
But that is the community that's coming out to the conferences are like that. Yes, I would agree. You know, this is really an opportunity for us to say, hey, okay, we're taking all our shifts. We messed up. Here's what we've learned. Here's what we're doing going forward. I mean, they might be forced into this. This thing could be dragging out for a long time.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
They could be, you know, the CEO can drag them out of Congress. Yeah.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
With problems that they had, you know, and it took a door blowing off. Yeah. The point is, is that it ultimately comes down to worker integrity, which is a component of food safety culture. Agreed. So again, back to your point, we're speculating because we don't know right now, but was the culture one in which you should not speak up?
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
I guess we're gonna find out. But I think a lot's going to come out. There's still a lot that can come out over time. This topic is not going to go away. And there are certain companies that unfortunately have their name associated with certain outbreaks.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
But, you know, that industry, the industry of fast food hamburgers really worked together because when there's E. coli in one brand, sales of hamburgers go down across all the brands.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
Exactly. So again, this is a big deal. It is a big deal. I haven't seen something like this to this degree in a while. And I don't think it's going to go away.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
And we still talk about it to this day. It was really amazing.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
The late David Thieno was the one who stepped in for Jack and the Pugs.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
And he built a legacy. It's really, for someone who is a go-getter, that's a phenomenal opportunity and maybe one that should be honored to come in and fix a system that's broke.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
Yeah. But, you know, I mean, we even had truffles on ice cream.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
Food safety is not a cost system. It should be put there as a profit center. If done right, maybe more floats to the top of either food protection, food quality, or it's a line item in most P&Ls are expense and not necessarily investment or protection.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
And so on everything that he would serve, everything, he would have the truffles in his hand and a grater and would shave it on top of your, in addition to what was already cooked into it as well. That's amazing. It was an amazing experience.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
And I think the other thing is going to be the supporting industry with investing in technology. The whole aspect of data, data analytics is already on a very rapid rise. And we're seeing more and more companies coming into this space that are vendors of technologics. Uh-huh.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
And I think, again, that kind of relates back to then maybe potentially understanding food safety could be one of the pockets with the data to support it.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
It's Crystal Gateway Marriott in Arlington, Virginia, October 19th through 22nd. We will be there again next year. Right about the same time as well. Join us this year. Please join us next year. We do have on foodsafetytech.com, there is a subscription link to our newsletter, which is free. All that information that we've been talking about is available in your inbox pretty much every week.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
And then information about our conferences also.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
So that's probably, I feel like that's accurate. We'll go with like 99%.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
I appreciate that. Thank you. Yeah. I love that you make it very easy to just talk.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
My pleasure. Thank you again.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
My name is Rick Byros. I know Kristen through working with her on a conference that I run and I launched called the Food Safety Consortium. In addition to the Food Safety Consortium, we also publish a digital publishing platform called foodsafetytech.com, which is... Same type of articles in our traditional trade journal, but now done online. We distribute our contents through weekly newsletters.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
I'm the content director, founder, publisher, chief bottle washer at Innovative Publishing, which is a parent company. Another platform called MedTech Intelligence, a colleague of mine runs. And we also have Cannabis Industry Journal.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
you know i guess for for many things there's some sort of stimulant or something that got it started and then things snowball so actually the legacy goes back well beyond even the launch of food saving tech a long time ago very early in my career what made the headlines was the e coli outbreak in the pacific northwest pacific yeah
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
The year was 1993, and I at the time was working on a trade publication as the national sales manager of a trade publication that was called Food Engineering. And I don't know why, but just this Jack in the Box thing broke out and just caught my interest. Yeah. Oh, it was awful. So I could see why. Four children died.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
And interestingly enough, not all of them actually ingested E. coli tainted hamburger.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
Yeah. So I just started investigating it. I started investigating it for I was working for a company that was food engineering. And I thought this could be a publication that could be, because we're looking into the idea of a food safety or a food quality publication that could be published alongside Food Engineer.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
And I did a lot of research on it, came up with a business plan, ready to present it to my boss. I told him about it conceptually. He thought it was a dumb idea. Oh, jeez. and never even entertained the business. So I was disappointed to say the least.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
And I ended up just having this idea, ended up leaving my job, getting a little bit of seed capital from a relative and mortgaging the house and started a company based on a launch of a magazine called Food Qualities. I did that for 12 years, 13 years. Built it up. It was a print magazine. We ended up doing two other print magazines and ended up selling the products to John Wiley and Sons.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
I worked there for two years. I decided working in a big corporate environment was not really for me. I understand that. I think it fits for some people. It just didn't. And decided to leave and left in 2009 at the height of a recession with a non-compete. Oh boy. And also feeling that print was dead and we needed to come up with a new platform.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
So we also, when I had Food Quality Magazine, I had pharmaceutical formulation quality. So I learned about the FDA regulations from not only food, but also pharma. Couldn't do anything in that market either. So decided to launch Red Tech Intelligence, which was for the medical device industry, focused on regulatory compliance. It took two years to really perfect the business model.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
And during that period, I got introduced to somebody and we decided to launch the conferences allied to it. So- After two years, my non-compete was up. So I took the business model that we had developed MedTech and applied that back to truly my roots in my career had been all within the food processing publishing industry.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
So I took what I learned there and we still publish MedTech intelligence, but then got back into the industry that I know and I love people that I've, you know, we're working with food quality. Now I was now working in the state. That also is why the Food Safety Consortium was an extension of publishing.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
There's just, you know, there's a lot of legacy. Talking to Mark Carter, who's the president of IDFP. And Mark and I go back almost 30 years as friends. He's doing a webinar with me, but also potentially speaking at the consortium. But, you know, Mark and I have known each other for years.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
And I could rattle off a bunch of other people that just through the course of 30 years, you know, and it's a really great industry.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
On the publishing side, actually within food quality, I ended up leading a project called a long time ago, but it was really kind of one of those events in your career that you really look back on fondly of. So come the time, the technology of ATP, environmental monitoring, really been just introduced. There was a lot of confusion in the industry on what it does.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
Some people in the industry thought it was actually replaced into traditional microbiology or definitive results. So I ended up leading a project that that We had readers of our magazine do demo tests, actually, and use an instrument in their plant for two weeks. And we put together an evaluation form for them to fill out, and they were able to demo.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
I think there were six or seven different companies that participated, providing each of our testers with an instrument and the supplies needed and instructions on how to use it. And then we compiled all this data into a research project that turned into an article. In addition to this, it was a pretty serious topic.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
And in order to just also have a little bit of fun with it, ATP is the same technology or the same chemical process that takes place in a firefly's butt load. Oh. Yeah. Excellent. So when there's presence of protein from a swab and then you connect that with the test, it glows like fireflies.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
We ended up hiring a cartoonist who did these personified fireflies flying around with swabs and quality control, you know, hairnets and things like that on them with the names of the different instruments manufacturers on their back or something like that. And That's brilliant. It was a lot of fun. And so when we did that and that article came out, it really made a massive impact in the street.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
We were hearing about that article five years later. There were companies that requested permission to use the artwork that we contracted for their marketing purposes. And we're using it 10 years later.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
experience. Within the consortium, there's a lot of like micro experiences. Basically, it's feedback from attendees. To your point, I heard back from somebody who I guess was kind of a mid-level person, possibly a shy person. Okay. And she said to me that she doesn't like public speaking. She doesn't like crowds.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
But the way I handled questions and answers of speakers, even like senior level FDA people, she said I took the intimidation out. And she was comfortable enough to stand in front of a group of people and ask questions. So she got a tremendous amount of value out of our conference. But she told me that the way we ran it and the way I... And I didn't even... Yeah, it wasn't the intent.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
I didn't think of this as just like kind of who I am. Much more casual, conversive versus stiff and sticking to a script. And she just felt so comfortable. She was able to get very engaged with the conference and got a lot out. So things like that.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
who told me that they exhibit at many larger conferences or trade shows, 10 times the size of the audience that we have. But he said that he got so much value out of ours because it's a smaller, more intimate type of setting for even exhibitors that are really just tabletops in front of the meeting room. And he walked away with 21 set appointments from mid to senior level exhibitors.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
Good for him. We get maybe a lot more leads from, say, a bigger show, but not the quality of the follow-up meetings. We usually, okay, well, yeah, follow up, but I actually have a point of 21 spread out over the next three weeks. Wow, that's great. He said that already is a great ROI.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
So from both an attendee standpoint, exhibitor standpoint, we just get good feedback and get a lot of that, and that's why I call them kind of these micro experiences.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
It's 12. Coming up to its, you know, this year will be its 13th.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
How Cybersecurity is Reshaping Food Safety with Rick Biros
Thanks for reminding me.