Earlier this year, Driscoll’s announced that Senior Vice President of Global Human Resources and General Counsel Tom O’Brien would step down from his leadership role. O’Brien’s career spans several decades, and he’s played instrumental roles in food safety legislation, national organic standards and more.
O’Brien shared some of his career highlights and where he sees the future of organic produce in the latest episode of The Packer’s “Tip of the Iceberg” podcast.
He says that as conversations about organic began in the 1990s, O’Brien says the ultimate goal was to define what that term meant, though that took some internal deliberations and some feedback from the public.
“Ultimately, the rule came out in 2000 after I had left the Department of Agriculture,” he says. “Kathleen Merrigan and Keith Jones really got the final rules that met consumers’ dictatations together — which was the goal all along. That trust in the standards remains to this day, 25 years later.”
O’Brien says that as he and the USDA worked on those national organic standards, it often felt like criticism against conventional production.
“We’ve moved past that, and there’s a lot more comfort in ‘these are the organic standards and there’s conventional,’” he says.
But, after graduating from college and law school, did he ever expect he’d be where he landed?
“I really gravitated toward the produce industry — its dynamism, its market orientation just really appealed to me, and as a native Californian, I wasn’t from agriculture but I understood it better,” he says.
O‘Brien‘s time working on getting funding to support the winegrape industry in the fight against the glassy-winged sharpshooter was another influential point in his career, he says, and then another a major highlight was joining Driscoll’s after spending time with a law firm in Washington, D.C., that did a lot of work with the company.
“What I really loved working in government is being that kind of translator between really two different cultures — government officials and agricultural professionals — and getting them both to understand the other‘s world and what constraints they operate in and to achieve policy goal by bringing the two together in ways that they could talk to one another a little more effectively,” he says.
And he says he’s had a firsthand seat to watch the growth of the organic sector from first working on those organic standards nearly 30 years ago.
“I don’t know that anyone would have predicted it then, but it’s truly remarkable,” he says. “The organic brand is really strong, but it’s also fragile. At the end of the day, you know it’s strong in the sense that consumers have demonstrated a willingness to pay for rigorous standards and to pay for organics they trust. There aren’t a lot of certifications that really have that premium that comes with the certification.”
He says there’s also a potential threat if consumers don’t stand behind those rigorous standards.
“There’s always that hint that people are willing to accept pretty easily that USDA combined with Big Ag is going to water down true organic standards and that that is a danger,” he says. “If people don’t stay behind rigorous standards, that premium [for organics] could go away.”
