HACCP HQ is where senior practitioners bring the calls they have to get right. Led by Professor Carol Wallace, one of the most experienced HACCP practitioners and researchers in the field. Sixty founding places.
The higher you go, the fewer people you can ask. You cannot take a half-formed doubt to your certification body. You cannot raise it with a customer. Internally there is often nobody above you who understands the technical question, and the peers who would understand it work for competitors.
So the hard calls get made alone. Whether a validation genuinely holds. Whether a supplier's certificate means anything. Whether to escalate something that might be nothing. Whether the plan you inherited would survive a serious challenge.
HACCP HQ is where those conversations happen, with people who have spent their careers on exactly these questions.
Emeritus Professor at the University of Central Lancashire, where she held the chair in Food Safety Management Systems and co-directed the International Institute of Nutritional Sciences and Applied Food Safety Studies. GFSI commissioned her to write A Culture of Food Safety, Version 2.0, published in March 2026 and now the global reference framework against which food safety culture is benchmarked. Her research covers HACCP effectiveness, food safety culture, the causes of foodborne outbreaks, and how well audit, inspection and governance systems actually perform. Her work has been cited more than four thousand times.
Before academia she spent close to twenty years in industry: food manufacturing, retail at Sainsbury's, and consultancy at RSSL, where she ran the third-party audit and training businesses. She joined UCLan in 2004 to build its MSc in Food Safety Management, took her doctorate on why HACCP succeeds or fails in multinational manufacturing, and was appointed Professor in 2014. She co-wrote the standard practical text on HACCP, now in its fourth edition, and Food Safety for the 21st Century.
Director of the Global Food Safety Initiative from 2019 to 2025, setting its strategic direction alongside the Consumer Goods Forum Board, the chief executives of the world's largest food retailers and manufacturers. She held responsibility for the benchmarking, harmonisation and oversight of every third-party standard GFSI recognises worldwide, which is what determines whether a certification scheme counts. She chaired the Government to Business Forum, convening more than 200 national food safety regulators, and led GFSI's formal engagement with the WHO, FAO, Codex and the World Food Programme.
Before GFSI she was Assistant Director at the Office for Product Safety and Standards, the UK's national product regulator, and a Vice President at Leatherhead Food Research. She led the MSc in Food Safety at two UK universities, Central Lancashire and Greenwich, and spent fourteen years as Technical Director of a ready-to-eat manufacturer supplying major retailers, airlines and healthcare. She wrote Aviation Food Safety for Wiley-Blackwell and led the rewrite of the food and water sections of the WHO Guide to Hygiene and Sanitation in Aviation.
Erica and Carol have known and worked alongside each other for over twenty years, first as colleagues at the University of Central Lancashire, teaching on the MSc in Food Safety Management, and since then across academia, industry and global governance. HACCP HQ brings them back to the same table.
Membership is for people responsible for food safety inside an operating business, and for the consultants and auditors who advise them. Everyone is welcome. The room works because of what members bring to it, and members who treat it as a place to prospect will find that becomes obvious quickly.
Company
£950
Up to three named people from one business. First year, renewing at the founding rate for as long as you stay.
Individual
£395
One named person. First year, renewing at the founding rate for as long as you stay.
Sixty founding places across both. We are opening before the library is finished, deliberately: founding members shape what goes into it. The annual day and the retreats are ticketed separately at member rates. Written review of a full HACCP plan, and facilitated retreats for a single technical team, are available to members and priced on application.
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