Wednesday, February 17, 2021
5:00 pm – 6:00 pm CT

Join the Young Professionals group for a relaxed, fun-filled happy hour. Mingle with one another while enjoying a DJ dance party and virtual mixology demonstration. Cheers!

Mingle with fellow YPs while learning how to mix Hurricane and Sazerac cocktails. Want to follow along with the bartender? Click here for a list of ingredients and equipment. Cheers!

Meet our Mixologist: Nick has been working as a Mixologist for 15 years, from dive bars to fine dining restaurants and everywhere in between. More recently, Nick has been operating a mobile beverage, catering, and cocktail class company calledFlying Cloud Bars in Wilmington, NC, specializing in amazing cocktails using fresh, seasonal ingredients to put a modern spin on the classics.

In between mixology demos, enjoy your cocktails as you and fellow participants enjoy a DJ dance party and trivia for chances to win prizes. As you prepare for the YP Happy Hour, be sure to dress up in your silliest Mardi Gras themed party outfit and tee your favorite Zoom background for a chance to win “Best Ready to Party.”

DJ Lee Dyson is the owner of Hey Mister DJ. Lee recently won the Biz Bash “DJ of the Year” award and is frequently booked to spin for some of LA’s most elite clientele and parties such as the Oscars, Emmys, American Idol, Dreamworks, Sony, Disney, NBC Universal, and many more.  Lee’s music knowledge runs very deep, with a chameleon-like ability to blend any genre of music for any crowd under any situation seamlessly.

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The U.S. egg industry is going through a major change that is going to shape the way eggs are produced in future years. This is the trend of converting a large proportion of the conventional facilities into cage-free types of facilities. This transition presents all sorts of important challenges that go from birds and worker health, to egg marketing, environmental impact, etc.

The share of the total eggs produced in cage-free was growing very slowly until the second half of 2015 when many restaurant chains announced pledges to buy only cage-free eggs by certain dates (mostly 2020 or 2025), and they were followed by grocery retailers and other types of customers in early 2016. Supplying cage-free eggs to all these customers would require the egg production of 224 million laying hens which is represents more than 2/3 of the U.S. flock.

On a parallel trend, some states passed legislation that will require all eggs sold in their territory to come from cage-free hens, or in facilities that require at least 1 ft²/hen floor space. Some of these state’s regulations have an intermediate step like providing certain space per hen earlier, for example, California Proposition 12 requires cage-free production by 2022 but it is already requiring 1 ft²/hen space as of January 1^st 2020. Approximately 75 million people live in the seven states that have passed legislation requiring at least 1ft²/hen space (67 million people live in states that will require cage-free production), and more states are likely to pass legislation in the near future adding at least 10 million more people.

There is some overlap between these 2 trends because many of the customers pledging to source cage-free eggs only have operations in states that already passed laying hens housing legislation, which makes it harder to identify how many total cage-free eggs are going to be needed.

This presentation will not only show the trends but also explain some of the most important challenges the egg industry is facing.

Presenter
Richard Gates
Egg Industry Center, Iowa State University

Food ecosystems are more complex than ever before. Changing regulations and trading partner requirements create a new level of compliance for companies at local and global level. One thing is clear, trading partners need to digitize their data, and prepare to be more transparent and nimble than ever before. 

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently released the proposed traceability record keeping rule for FSMA section 204. These preventative efforts extend internationally, as the US is working with Mexico, Canada and other countries on enhanced partnerships to work together on food safety. 

Learn how the drafted legislation may apply to your own food safety, data and product tracing programs. Hear how companies have approached digitizing their operations, and how solution providers are testing interoperability between blockchain and cloud based traceability solutions.

Presenter
Julie McGill
FoodLogiQ

COVID-19 had an unprecedented impact on food and nutrition, an industry that was already in a continuous pattern of change. Through extensive worldwide research, Euromonitor International identified a series of strategic themes in food and nutrition that shape both consumer preferences and producer responses, molding the global market as a result. In this presentation, Euromonitor International assesses the impact COVID-19 has had on these themes, indicating how consumer concerns and behaviors shifted, how food and nutrition producers responded and how all are evolving alongside the pandemic.

Learning Objectives

1. Identify the overarching global trends in food and nutrition
2. Discover the impact of the pandemic on these trends and implications for consumer behavior
3. Learn which consumer preferences and concerns in food accelerated because of COVID-19 and determine the best opportunities going forward

Presenter
Tom Rees
Euromonitor International

Presentation Date & Time
Wednesday, February 17, 2021
1:00 pm – 1:35 pm CT

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