Road Map to Food's Future: Trends, Genomics and Industry Attacks

How food and health juxtapose on the body is where the dream of disease avoidance combines with the reality of modern human genome sequencing. How future food traits will interact beneficially for consumers, what trends will manifest and how the food industry responds to attacks against its integrity will highlight the three Hot Topic technical sessions in this year's Institute of Food Technologists Annual Meeting + Food Expo(r), July 12-16, at Chicago's McCormick Place Convention Center.

As the largest annual technical meeting and exhibition of its kind in the world, the IFT Annual Meeting + Food Expo(r) will host 1,000 exhibiting companies, more than 20,000 registered attendees and 1,000 technical presentations this year including these Hot Topic Sessions:

- Food Trends: The Top 5 for '05 - July 13, 2:30 p.m.

- The Brave New World of Nutragenomics - July 14, 9 a.m.

- Food Fight: The Food Industry Under Attack - July 15, 9 a.m.

Top 5 Trends will focus on emerging trends and what the future of the food industry holds in store for businesses and consumers. A diverse panel of experts will represent food processing to food service, government to marketing, and each will present significant trends they recognize as imminent.

The Brave New World of Nutragenomics will provide insight on gene chips and other new technologies, how they work and what promise they hold. Potential business opportunities and obstacles created by nutragenomics will take precedence and include the social and ethical issues involved. Conclusions will include the corporate requirements necessary for this new era.

Hot Topics sessions close with Food Fight: The Food Industry Under Attack, a candid assessment of situations which bring the food industry negative publicity carrying legal and societal ramifications. Expert speakers representing legal, political, academic, and industry perspectives will address the impacts of litigation and industry responses on topics such as nutrition, obesity, California's Proposition 65, and genetically modified foods.

The IFT Annual Meeting + Food Expo(r) delivers comprehensive, cutting-edge research and opinion from food science-, technology-, marketing- and business-leaders. Scientific perspective and solutions to world food issues proceed beyond this five-day event, when IFT co-hosts the World Congress of Food Science and Technology XII, July 16-20, at Hilton Chicago.

More information on these events is available online at http://www.am-fe.ift.org.

Founded in 1939, the Institute of Food Technologists is a not-for-profit international scientific society with 28,000 members working in food science, technology and related professions in industry, academia and government. As the society for food science and technology, IFT brings sound science to the public discussion of food issues. For more on IFT, see www.ift.org.