Dr Liliana Casal-Wardle, Ph.D. is a Senior Advisor for The Acheson Group (TAG). She has twenty-five years of experience in the private industry. She had technical and global leadership roles managing supply chain food safety and product quality at the Corporate level for The Hershey Company from 2002 to 2019. In this role she provided guidance and direction to more than two hundred facilities ranging from suppliers, internal facilities, external partners (comanufacturing, copacking, licensing, food service) and distributors, based in the US and internationally for product manufactured for regional, global and US markets.
Dr Casal-Wardle has managed a diverse group of food platforms within the scope of chocolate, sugar and snack manufacturing that span from high to low water activity products and commodities, with primary focus on food safety culture, risk mitigation, project and process design for brand and consumer protection. The complexity of this portfolio was enhanced by a diverse regulatory environment because of multi-country sourcing and global retail. Her specific areas of expertise include Supply Chain Food Safety, Food Safety Culture, Food Science, Food Defense, Cleaning and Sanitation practices, Environmental Microbiological Monitoring Programs, GFSI requirements and Quality Assurance, amongst others.
Dr Casal-Wardle had a strong focus on Latin America as part of her tenure in Hershey. In this role she managed supply chain food safety, quality and regulatory requirements to meet global retail targets. Other global projects such as products manufactured in China for global markets, comanufacturing in Europe, ingredient sourcing in Canada were also under her scope.
Her career in the private sector started in Sao Paulo, Brazil developing food safety and quality systems for Indeca (Industrias de Cacao) and aligning those for UCP (United Cocoa Processors) which was part of the same group.
Prior to this she was a Researcher and Educator at the University of Buenos Aires and Sao Paulo, focused on tropical diseases. During the early years of her career as a Ph.D. student, she had the opportunity to live in Australia and participate in research projects on tropical diseases at the Royal Melbourne Hospital.
Liliana has a Ph.D. from the Organic Chemistry Department of the University of Buenos Aires where she focused on structural and biological studies of Chagas Disease. She speaks three languages (English, Spanish, Portuguese) and has had the opportunity to reside in and be professionally active in Argentina, Australia, Brazil and the US. She is a certified SQF Practitioner and a FSMA Preventive Controls Qualified Individual (PCQI). She is also a member of IAFP, IFT, PMCA and AACT.