New Compliance Officer Alyssa Licata Brings Fresh Perspective and Skill set to LGMA

The California Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement (LGMA) has a new Compliance Officer.

“We are very pleased to welcome Alyssa to the LGMA as our new Compliance Officer. We anticipate her skill set as a microbiologist will provide the LGMA with a unique skill set, new eyes, and a fresh perspective. We are very much looking forward to having her on the LGMA team. The job of the Compliance Officer is extremely important. When customers purchase leafy greens from our members, it’s with the expectation that all of the LGMA’s required food safety practices are being followed and verified by government audits. The Compliance Officer’s role is to double-check to make sure this is happening.”

- Tim York, CEO of the California LGMA

Under the LGMA system, the role of the Compliance Officer is to review all government audit reports of member farms. Most importantly, the Compliance Officer is charged with working to ensure any infractions cited during these mandatory audits have been corrected. If the correction cannot be made immediately on-site during the audit, the Compliance Officer is charged with making sure that members submit a Corrective Action Plan and that the infraction is, in fact, corrected in a timely manner. Additionally, the Compliance Officer makes sure corrections have been verified in a follow-up audit. In short, the Compliance Officer’s role is to ensure that members are in fact in 100 percent compliant with all required food safety practices under the LGMA.

Highly qualified for her new role, Licata has a Bachelor of Science degree in Cell and Molecular Biology from California State University, Monterey. Most recently she was Lab Manager for Seed Dynamics, Inc. Prior to that, she worked as a Food Safety Specialist for Markon Cooperative where she brought a scientific approach to understanding why food safety and environmental safety were important for Markon’s 250 produce suppliers. As part of her duties at Markon, she maintained a supplier food safety database, created Standard Operating Procedure documents to improve workflow and conducted departmental research in understanding E. coli presence among leafy greens.