Yvon Bertrand is a senior international food safety and inspection expert with over 45 years of experience in food safety, agriculture, food science, and public health. His work includes consulting, inspecting, auditing, and providing technical assistance in the food safety industry. Yvon trained companies on food safety and processing projects in North America, Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Since 2010, he has performed over 900 audits of food processing establishments in North America.
As an expert for the Technical Assistance Partnership—Expert Deployment Mechanism (TAP-EDM), Yvon, along with two other Canadian experts, Brian McKay and Bill Anderson, is working collaboratively with the Zambian Ministry of Commerce to identify Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) gaps in Zambia’s food and agricultural trade regulations and strengthen the country’s experts’ ability to manage them. He has also completed a project with Brian McKay, Martin Gooch, and Delia Bucknell, with the Government of Guyana and the Ministry of Agriculture. Their work supports the development of the fruit agro-processing sector in Guyana, focusing on providing technical assistance in supply chain management, market research, and product development.
Yvon has a special connection with agriculture. His family owned a dairy farm when he was growing up. Today, as an experienced trainer in food safety management systems, he has dedicated most of his career to training people and companies on food safety and processing. Yvon strongly emphasizes that eliminating hazards in food production environments is possible when people are better trained, starting from colleges and universities.
Based in Quebec, Canada, Yvon has a bachelor of science in Agronomy from McGill University and the Government of Canada Executive Development Certification. Yvon has a Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point (HACCP) National Lead Auditor certificate from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, Safe Quality Food (SQF) certificate from NSF International, and Food Safety Preventive Controls for Human Food certificate from the Food Safety Preventive Controls Alliance (FSPCA).