Hal King

Founder and CEO

Dr. Hal King is Managing Partner at Active Food Safety, a new Advisory Services and Digital Products company, and Founder/CEO of Public Health Innovations, a public health strategy and design company. Dr. King is also an Associate Professor of Public Health at the University of Georgia College of Public Health.

Dr. King is a public health professional who has worked in the investigation of foodborne and other disease outbreaks (at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, U. S. Public Health Service), performed federally funded research on the causation and prevention of infectious diseases  (at Emory University School of Medicine, Division of Infectious Diseases), and worked in the prevention of intentional adulteration of foods and food defense in the United States and for Army force health (with the U.S. Army Reserves Consequence Management Unit, 20th CBRNE Command).

Dr. King is formally the Director of Food and Product Safety at Chick-fil-A Inc. (a national restaurant chain with over 2,000 restaurants and $10 billion in annual sales) where he designed and led Chick-fil-A’s Food Safety Management Program for 11 years; the topic of his first book,  Food Safety Management: Implementing a Food Safety Program in a Food Retail Business (Springer). Dr. King is also the co-author and author of several articles and book chapters on public health interventions including numerous peer-reviewed research publications on the science of public health including safe food manufacturing and food allergen controls in foodservice, and holds several U.S. Patents and Patent Pending technologies, Copyrights and Trademarks. Dr. King's next book, Food Safety Management Systems, will be published July 2020 as part of the IAFP Food Microbiology Series by Springer.

Dr. King is the recipient of the 2018 NSF International Food Safety Leadership and Innovation Award.