Leadership

Erik R. Lieberman, President and Founder

Erik R. Lieberman is an attorney and licensed customs broker. Lieberman has extensive experience on legal matters involving food safety, international trade, food labeling, agriculture, food marketing and the federal legislative and regulatory processes.  Lieberman has been featured on Fox News, National Public Radio and C-SPAN, and in The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, Bloomberg Businessweek and The Washington Post. He is a frequent speaker at food industry conferences. Lieberman is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Florida and received his Juris Doctor from the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

Lieberman is a member of the Food Safety Preventive Controls Alliance and helped write the FDA-recognized official training materials for the Foreign Supplier Verification Program course.

Formerly, Lieberman led the regulatory affairs division at the Food Marketing Institute (FMI), the trade association for the largest supermarket chains and wholesalers in the United States. As FMI’s vice president and chief regulatory counsel, Lieberman represented the food retailing and wholesaling industries before federal agencies ranging from the Food and Drug Administration and Department of Agriculture to the Department of Labor and Department of Justice. Lieberman worked with federal agencies in the rulemaking process to ensure that regulations were effective while not being unnecessarily burdensome on industry. Lieberman led the supermarket industry’s efforts on implementation of the Food Safety Modernization Act. He also served as the primary point of contact at FMI for regulatory compliance and legal questions of member companies, advising the legal, food safety/quality assurance, meat, government affairs and communications/consumer affairs departments of the largest firms in the supermarket industry on these matters. In addition, Lieberman was responsible for managing FMI’s legal budgets and relationships with outside law firms.

Before joining FMI, Lieberman served as the Majority Regulatory Counsel for the House Small Business Committee. As Majority Regulatory Counsel, he was the primary advisor to the Chairwoman on administrative law matters. During his time on the Committee, he served as lead counsel for 20 full committee and subcommittee hearings on issues ranging from regulatory relief to antitrust, food safety, Medicare, data security, environmental protection and transportation. Lieberman conducted oversight on Department of Agriculture, Federal Trade Commission, Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security and Environmental Protection Agency rulemaking and enforcement activities during his tenure with the Committee.

From 2004-2007, he was Director of Government Affairs at the National Grocers Association. Prior to that, he served as a legislative assistant to U.S. Senator Bob Graham.

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