QA Editor Reflects on Frank Yiannas' Q&A Interview

Editor's note: This article originally appeared in the Nov./Dec. print issue of QA Magazine under "Time of Arrival."

Frank Yiannas was one of the first people in the industry who I interviewed when I started working at Quality Assurance & Food Safety magazine. (That story four years ago was about traceability.)

He was the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) deputy commissioner for food policy and response at the time, and part of my research before the interview was, of course, reading the two previous cover stories the magazine had done on him. The first time was in 2013, when he was vice president of food safety at Walmart. Then he was on the cover again in 2019 soon after joining FDA.

His third appearance on this issue’s cover puts him comfortably in the lead for most cover appearances. That fact should speak to the impact he’s had on the way we think and talk about food safety.

Now that he’s approaching almost two years since leaving FDA, he’s firmly within the next chapter of his life and career. You can tell just by looking at him, reading what he shares on social media and listening as he talks at industry events.

“My goal is to try to advance food safety, challenge conventional thinking and maybe cause people to rethink what they’re doing. I want to help create more thinkers and more leaders,” he told me during our conversation for the Q&A.

Soon after our interview, news broke about the E. coli outbreak traced to onions at McDonald’s that resulted in one death as of press time.

That outbreak came on the heels of the Boar’s Head outbreak during the summer. In October, Boar’s Head announced that Yiannas would be leading a food safety advisory council at the company to find out what happened, why it happened and how to prevent it from happening again.

While Yiannas puts a lot of faith in the next crop of food safety professionals and the technology that will empower them, he also knows there’s a lot of work that needs to be done to curb foodborne illness. But he also told me that food safety professionals never quite fully arrive and have to stay open to new ideas and approaches. After 35 years in the industry (and three QA covers), he’s still learning every day. We should all follow his lead.