Seattle Food Safety Lawyer Bill Marler Honored at 20th CIFSQ in Shanghai

On Oct. 28, the China International Food Safety & Quality Conference (CIFSQ) opens in Shanghai for its 20th year — and it will honor Seattle food safety attorney Bill Marler as a Distinguished Contributor. Marler, a food safety expert and Publisher of Food Safety News, built his reputation litigating foodborne illness cases through his firm, Marler Clark. Twenty years ago, he was simply a lawyer cold-calling a brand-new conference in Beijing.

He's not the only honoree. The Distinguished Contributor class of 2025 also includes Wu Yongning, chief scientist at the China National Center for Food Safety Risk Assessment (CFSA) and director of the National Health Commission's Key Laboratory of Food Safety Risk Assessment, and Cindy Jiang, global food safety ambassador and former senior director of global food safety at McDonald's.

The ceremony goes further, recognizing Ge Zhirong, the conference's honorary chairman and former deputy director of China's General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine, and Chen Junshi, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and chief advisor to CFSA, for distinguished leadership. Institutional honors round out the roster:

• The International Association for Food Protection is named the conference's distinguished global host.
• Distinguished supporters include the FDA, USDA, the European Food Safety Authority, Germany's Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR), the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, and the Shanghai JS Life Sciences Institute.

How did a Seattle lawyer end up here?

It started with pets. During the 2007 melamine pet food recalls, someone told Marler about a new conference that China's quality and quarantine agency, AQSIQ, was launching in Beijing. He called the organizers. They offered a keynote slot — on the condition that Marler Clark become the Platinum sponsor. The firm agreed. It kept doing so, year after year.

That first September, at the inaugural CIFSQ, Marler delivered a keynote titled "The Legal Costs of Foodborne Illness." A year later he returned to Beijing with "How US Consumers Hold Producers Accountable: A Civil Litigation Lesson in the US Market" — delivered just as the melamine-tainted infant formula scandal was breaking. For an attorney who makes his living quantifying what contamination costs, the timing was stark.

"I said then that Chinese food safety officials were doing exactly the right thing by inviting people from around the world to come and share what they knew. I still think so," Marler said.

What does this change for operators and regulators?

For the food industry, the conference's value isn't ceremonial. Marler frames it in one statement that reads like a supply-chain warning for any operator sourcing globally:

"Food does not stay home. An ingredient that leaves a plant in one country can make people sick in another before anyone has a name for it, and the regulators, scientists and companies who have to find it rarely sit in the same room. For twenty years, CIFSQ has put them there."

That's the operating logic behind the event's unusual guest list — U.S. litigators, Chinese regulators, EU risk assessors, and McDonald's-trained food safety executives, all in one Shanghai convention hall. The 20th-anniversary edition doubles as a checkpoint for that experiment in cross-border coordination. As supply chains stretch longer and outbreaks cross borders faster, the room Marler describes is one the industry will likely need more, not less.