Manager of Scientific and Regulatory Affairs, American Frozen Food Institute

My name is Sarah Brandmeier and I am the Manager of Scientific and Regulatory Affairs for the American Frozen Food Institute. We are a national trade association and we promote the interests of the frozen food and beverage industry. I work pretty closely with the other members at AFFI or my colleagues at AFFI and I also interact with our membership and I, as I said, I work with my team and we really watch the regulatory landscape, you know, what's going on in the frozen food industry. And we really, we watch closely at what's going on in DC but also more broadly. For me, I really look at what's happening nutrition-wise and how that might affect our members and then go from there. I work with the rest of the Scientific and Regulatory Affairs team and we kind of act accordingly. If it's a really big issue for our membership that's kind of when we make the decision of how we're going to go from there. I do spend a good portion of my time at the office but there's also the opportunity to go downtown into DC and attend different meetings, attend different conferences and meet and interact with others in the industry. So one of the projects that we've worked on is monitoring the nutrition facts panel and then assessing how it would affect our membership and moving forward and how we would proceed with that issue. So a lot of the time a member will come to us and they'll say, "Hey, you know, "can you look more into this?" Or, "What does this mean in the regulation? "Can you help us with this?" Or, that's kind of how we decide what we're going to do is we really use our membership and that's how we move forward.