WSDA Blog

In February 2024, Gena Reich celebrated her 40th work anniversary at WSDA. We are so grateful to have her in our department as she is truly dedicated to helping people in the agricultural industry. Gena is WSDA’s Food Safety & Consumer Services Policy and Performance Administrator.  

While Gena has been working here for over 40 years, no two days have been the same. She’s had various roles over the years in different divisions and has had a positive impact on many people’s lives.  

Gena is committed to helping people understand why WSDA regulations are in place and supporting them in meeting those regulations so we can keep our food safe and protect people. With every role Gena has had, she’s always excited to learn new things and loves thinking outside the box to come up with smart solutions to help people. 


 

Why WSDA?

Gena grew up on a farm in Whitman County, which allowed her to see first-hand what challenges farmers were facing and how they responded to WSDA regulations. One morning, when Gena and her family had gotten up early to grease the combines and wait for sunrise to dry the dew so they could harvest, a couple of the neighbor farmers came over to chat. While the farmers were chatting, there was a WSDA noxious weed person driving around in a pickup truck to each farm. Young Gena was able to overhear all the dad’s talking about this WSDA worker and learn that the farmers weren’t against the regulations, they just wanted them to be sensible and fairly applied to everyone.  

For Gena’s entire career, she has tried to help people just like the farmers she grew up with by advocating for sensible regulations, educating people about why those regulations are in place, and helping people meet those regulations. Gena doesn’t want regulations to be a big mystery for people to solve; she wants people to have the information and resources they need so they can successfully meet the regulations. She finds it rewarding to be able to figuratively hold people’s hands through the regulation processes and help them with their documents. 

Gena also loves that she is always learning at WSDA, even after 40 years. Everything is always changing, from industry to technology to policies, so there’s something new to learn all the time. She also appreciates working together with her team, so different perspectives can be shared and heard.
 

Gena’s Career Journey at WSDA

1984 - Gena started at WSDA in 1984 with the Pesticide Management Division in Yakima as an Agricultural Chemical specialist. She was out in the field all the time doing surveillance and taking samples to make sure people were following the protocols for using pesticides. In her first year on the job, she had 187 cases to investigate! (WSDA doesn’t let people have that many cases anymore.) She gained a lot of good experience out in the field working with farmers. 

1986 - After a couple of years, she had an opportunity to become a dairy inspector in the Yakima Valley. Gena’s college degree is in Animal Science, so this role lined up with her background and education, so she took the position.  

As a dairy inspector in the Yakima Valley, Gena was responsible for the area between Walla Walla, Ellensburg, and Othello. Back then there were a lot more dairies and they did inspections every 4 months, so Gena had a packed schedule visiting lots of dairies. She would inspect milking parlors for sanitation as well as dairy plants. They would make sure the equipment and its circuitry were performing correctly because every drop of milk needs to be heated for the right amount of time and at the right temperature to be safe.  

She would get calls starting at 5 am until 11 pm from dairy farmers with emergencies and she had to respond immediately if there was a broken seal. If dairies have a broken seal, they can’t pasteurize and bottle milk, so it must be fixed right away.  

At the time, she only had a home phone for them to call. When her second son was born, she was dealing with a newborn at home as well as a phone ringing off the hook. Due to her home phone making it impossible with a newborn, Gena became the first field person at WSDA to get a cell phone so her home phone could calm down. It was a huge phone that plugged into the cigarette lighter in the car but that way the dairy farmers could call the cell phone at all hours instead.  

Later on, when her kids were growing up, if there was an emergency call after hours and no babysitters were available, Gena would have to bring along her two kids in her own car, since she couldn’t take the kids in the state car, for the dairy inspection. She can still easily picture her kids being dressed up in lab coats and her telling them to sit next to her and be still while she was working to retest and reseal a pasteurizer. 

1991 - While working as a dairy inspector, Gena had the opportunity to help out with some work for the Food side of the Food Safety Program. At the time, the Food Safety Program was broken up into two distinct sections that didn’t work together, a Dairy Safety Group and a Food Safety Group. But after Gena proved that you could work on both Dairy and Food at the same time, WSDA combined Dairy and Food Safety into one group so inspectors could do both dairy and food inspections. This was a big internal shift for the program that helped make things more efficient.  

1992 - Eight years into her career at WSDA, Gena was promoted to be the Food Safety Region Manager for Eastern, WA which she then did for about 26 years. Gena was never bored with her job because the Food Safety division was always absorbing other smaller divisions like egg and custom meat inspections, so she was always learning something new. The laws themselves would also change over time and she had to learn all about various inspections with different requirements. 

2006 - Gena began managing the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) contracts for the Food Safety Program.  

2018 - In the Spring of 2018, she had the opportunity to become the coordinator for the Manufactured Food Regulatory Program Standards (MFRPS). These are the FDA food safety standards that WSDA must meet. She continued to do FDA contract management as well.  

2019 – When the Food Safety Compliance person left the program, Gena took on the compliance role as well. 

2022 - In November of 2022, she was promoted again to her current role, which is the WSDA Food Safety & Consumer Services Policy and Performance Administrator. Gena believes this is the perfect position for her now since it combines all the knowledge gained from her many roles. She oversees public disclosure requests and the Rapid Response team (which responds to food and animal feed emergencies). She also coordinates with the Department of Health and the FDA, trains people for her old positions, and does a lot of legislative bill review. 
 

Career Highlight 

One of Gena’s favorite highlights of her career started as a terrible situation, but then fortunately turned into a big success between 1997 to 1999. 

In Yakima Valley, there was commercial soft Mexican cheese coming in from California, but it didn’t taste right to the locals. So, people started making their own soft Mexican cheese illegally, but it made a lot of people sick, and they ended up in the hospital (there were 104 cases of antibiotic resistant Salmonella DT).  

To solve this problem, Gena’s team worked with local health departments in several counties and Washington State University (WSU) to come up with a new soft Mexican cheese recipe that would be safe to make for home use, preferably using pasteurized milk from the store as opposed to raw milk. 

Gena’s team also wanted to find someone who could make the cheese legally in Yakima so they could license it and there would be a local source. WSDA worked with the locals to develop a second recipe that the locals liked the taste of, and which followed a safe, legal process. WSDA was then able to help a local business get a license to sell this new legal version of the cheese in the area so people could buy a safe version at the store instead of making it themselves.  

After successfully getting this recipe to work in Yakima Valley, Gena’s team decided to share this intellectual property with the rest of the country so other states across the U.S. could also utilize this safe and legal recipe for soft Mexican cheese. Gena’s team ended up getting a Governor’s Award for this project. Making sure the food we eat is safe is a vital component of WSDA’s role in protecting public health. 
 

Changes in the Industry 

Gena has been able to witness lots of growth and change in the industry including new foods, technologies, and equipment advances. She remembers when pre-sliced apple slices were a new and novel thing. Now, custom-designed equipment to make apple slices is available. She also loves the creative creations people are making nowadays, like Graples, an apple that has been dipped in grape flavoring and tastes like a grape. 

She also loves how they’ve been able to make their work easier by utilizing new technology. She remembers the days of using carbon paper to make copies of reports. She was so happy to deploy the first round of laptops for inspectors so they could make their reports more consistent and professional. She was able to work with one of her staff members to make electronic inspection forms that automatically add canned violation citations and corrective action expectations, which Gena described as magical! 
 

Hobbies Outside of Work

When Gena is not working, she loves spending time with her husband, two sons, and five grandkids. Some of her favorite hobbies are quilting, reading, boating, fishing, and taking motorcycle trips with her husband. Gena and her husband have a tradition where they go on a motorcycle trip every summer with no plan, they just pick a direction and go.  


 

Wrap-Up

On behalf of WSDA, I want to say a big thank you to Gena Reich for allowing me to interview her and for all the amazing work she has done, and continues to do, for our department. I hope this blog post has provided you with some helpful insights into what a career at WSDA can look like and gave you a glimpse into the many different roles we have.  

If you’re interested in starting your own career at WSDA, check out our government careers webpage.