Former FDA Leader, Alan Tart, to Deliver Keynote at SafetyChain’s ChainReaction Summit 2026

LAGUNA BEACH, Calif. – September 15, 2026 – SafetyChain, the digital plant management platform for food and beverage manufacturers, announced that Alan Tart, former FDA leader with  three decades of food safety and regulatory experience and Principal Consultant at Tart Strategic Consulting Group, will deliver the keynote presentation at ChainReaction 2026, the company's sixth annual user conference. 

Formerly known as the SafetyChain Summit, ChainReaction brings together food safety, quality, operations, and manufacturing leaders to explore the technologies, strategies, and leadership practices shaping the future of food and beverage manufacturing. The theme for this year's event, “Lead with Insight. Scale with Confidence”, helps manufacturers turn operational data into faster decisions and stronger risk management. .

Tart’s keynote, See the Signal. Lead the Change: Six Leadership Practices for Turning Data Into Lasting Change, will explore how leaders can use insights surfaced through digital plant management platforms—and principles of adaptive leadership—to turn data into stronger decision-making and lasting change. Tart will share six practices for diagnosing the problems behind data signals, learning from resistance, keeping people engaged under pressure, placing responsibility closer to the work, aligning goals and incentives, and protecting change when competing priorities return.

"Food and beverage manufacturers have access to more information than ever before, but data only becomes valuable when it changes how people make decisions," said Steven Delzell, VP of Product Strategy at SafetyChain Software. "Turning that information into meaningful action depends on recognizing the patterns that matter, asking the right questions, and ultimately giving leaders the confidence to respond before risks escalate. Alan combines decades of food safety and regulatory leadership  experience with a practical understanding of how manufacturers can strengthen that capability, and that's exactly the conversation we want to bring to ChainReaction." 

Tart will show food safety leaders how to tell a routine technical issue from a deeper organizational problem — and how to use frontline knowledge to understand what the numbers actually mean. Attendees will leave with approaches for turning data patterns into changes that hold up under production and staffing pressure. 

"As digital platforms and AI make it easier to uncover patterns across manufacturing operations, leaders have an opportunity to move beyond simply reviewing records and begin understanding what those patterns are telling them," said Tart. "Technology can help organizations recognize risk sooner, but sustained improvement depends on how leaders respond once those signals become visible."

In addition to Tart’s keynote, ChainReaction 2026 will feature customer-led presentations offering a practical look at how food and beverage manufacturers are using data, technology, and change management to solve problems across their operations. 

James Boros, Quality Manager at Karlsburger Foods, Inc., will share how he led the rollout of SafetyChain across two facilities and secured buy-in from an initially skeptical operations team. Before the implementation, his team spent at least three hours each day reviewing paper documents, with missing forms or signatures capable of delaying shipments. Boros will discuss the conversations and tactics that helped employees embrace the system, reduce time spent reviewing paperwork, and gain clearer visibility into document completion and compliance.

James Downs, Data Systems Manager at CrossPoint Polymer Technologies, will join Michael Greene, Continuous Improvement Coach at SafetyChain, for a candid discussion of CrossPoint’s transition from instinct-led production decisions to a data-driven approach. They will explore how the company implemented Overall Equipment Effectiveness, developed purpose-built reports to identify downtime and margin-loss drivers, and used visible early wins to build trust on the production floor. The session will also examine how CrossPoint reduced changeover time, eliminated chronic failures, and encouraged teams to use yield data to improve performance. 

Laura Dunn Nelson, Vice President of Product Management, Food Safety & Strategic Alliances at WorkForge, and Kim Maddox, Complex Safety Manager at Wayne-Sanderson Farms, will explore what separates training that records completion from training that builds genuine competency. Drawing on the realities of wet, loud, multilingual production environments, they will discuss the measures Wayne-Sanderson uses to assess whether employees understand why critical procedures matter and whether a training program can retain its effectiveness as the organization adds shifts, production lines, and facilities. 

Shamonique Schrick, Global SQM & Audit Technology Lead at Cargill, and Chris Van Patten, Digital Solutions Owner at Cargill, will share how the company’s supplier compliance team gained a clearer view of whether requirements were being completed across the organization. The pair will discuss how Cargill built a Power BI view using SafetyChain’s APIs, retired 10 manually managed reports, and developed a more useful set of questions to guide decisions from supplier data. 

Chris Stirk, General Manager at Lone Star Dairy Products, will explain how the company connected SafetyChain with Ignition at its Canyon, Texas, facility, which processes approximately one billion pounds of milk each year. Since going live in October 2025, Lone Star has gone paperless across packaging, warehouse, and laboratory operations and reduced quality sign-off time by approximately 80%. Stirk will take attendees through the implementation and show how the integration has helped the team reduce waste, act on information sooner, and devote less time to administrative work. 

ChainReaction is SafetyChain's annual conference for food and beverage manufacturing professionals, bringing together customers, industry experts, and technology leaders to share practical strategies for improving food safety, quality, compliance, and operational performance.

SafetyChain is the plant management platform for food and beverage manufacturers, providing tools for quality, food safety, production, maintenance, and supplier compliance. The platform connects plant-floor execution with the broader systems manufacturers rely on, supporting operations from a single facility to multi-site enterprise environments.