FoodSHIELD

The Food & Ag sector is a complex, highly disparate system that struggled to coordinate and modernize to address emerging needs and challenges as the food system became more interconnected. This need, coupled with well entrenched information sharing silos, required a unique approach to collaboration, focusing on secure, on-demand resource allocation to enable cross-agency collaboration. Stakeholders and end users needed equal voices in the development of the platform to insure adoption.

Users from federal, state, local, tribal, military, academic, and private industry have grown FoodSHIELD from a small pilot in 2005 to a wide-ranging collaboration and data exchange platform. Now considered mission critical to food & ag users across the country, it has earned official Standard Operating Procedure status for federal agencies. FoodSHIELD serves 30,000 users globally with more than a million minutes annually of webinar collaboration enabled for real time information sharing via the 3,000 working groups and tens of thousands of documents shared.

• FoodSHIELD was Honorable Mention for national collaboration platforms at the Adobe Max Awards over three years
• State teams adopt FoodSHIELD to augment data sharing and collaboration inside task forces and state departments
• Rapid Response Teams utilize FoodSHIELD for primary data sharing between the states and FDA during early stage outbreak activation
• FoodSHIELD coordinates Emergency Planning between states to insure seamless data sharing reducing time to address emerging issues
• FoodSHIELD Portal now contains 29 applications to serve data sharing, gathering, and collaboration needs for the sector
• Voted #1 food & ag online portal for use by its users in a 2015 poll by an independent organization
• A new app store now allows other entities to build food & ag specific applications for use and access for vetted FoodSHIELD members in addition to its core capabilities