Last updated: July 9, 2026
Food Poisoning News is a news publication covering food recalls, foodborne-illness outbreaks, and the science and law of food safety. This page explains the standards we hold ourselves to, covering how we work, how we source our reporting, how we handle independence and conflicts of interest, and how we answer to our readers when we get something wrong.
These standards are guided by widely recognized principles of journalism ethics, including the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics and the Trust Project’s Trust Indicators. We are not a member of, and are not certified by, either organization. We simply hold our newsroom to the practices they describe.
Our mission and coverage priorities
Food Poisoning News reports on food safety for a United States audience. Our goal is to help readers understand what was recalled or investigated, why it matters, and what they can do to protect themselves and their families.
Our coverage priorities are:
- Food recalls and safety alerts issued by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (USDA/FSIS)
- Foodborne-illness outbreaks tracked by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), state and local health departments, and, for Canadian recalls, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA)
- The science of foodborne illness (the pathogens, products, and practices behind food-safety incidents)
- The legal and consumer-protection issues that follow serious outbreaks and recalls
We publish for readers across the country and do not claim to be a local, on-the-ground newsroom. Our strength is gathering and explaining national recall and outbreak information from official sources.
Who we are and how we are staffed
Food Poisoning News is a small newsroom of named contributors who research and write our articles. Editorial direction is provided by Tony Coveny, who recruits contributors and reviews articles. We do not maintain a large editorial board, an in-house style committee, or a public editor, and we do not claim to.
You can find biographies for many of our contributors on our Authors page. Two older, generic author accounts remain from earlier years of the site and are being retired in favor of named human bylines.
Accuracy and taking responsibility for our work
We take responsibility for the accuracy of what we publish. We verify the key facts of a recall or outbreak (product names, lot and code information, dates, affected states, and reported illnesses) against the official notice before we publish, and we prefer original documents such as agency recall notices and safety alerts over second-hand accounts.
Food Poisoning News does not operate a separate fact-checking desk, and we do not employ an independent or medical reviewer. Verification is part of how our articles are written and edited, not a separate department or a formal “reviewed by” step. We describe that process in full in our Sourcing & Fact-Checking Policy.
How we source our reporting
We build our recall and outbreak coverage from primary sources. These include recall notices and safety alerts from the FDA and USDA/FSIS, outbreak information from the CDC and state and local health departments, recall notices from the CFIA, and, where relevant, peer-reviewed research and reporting from established news organizations.
We cite our sources in the body of our articles and link to the original notice or study so that readers can check the record for themselves. Recalls and outbreak investigations change as agencies release new information. When the underlying facts change, we update our articles. Our full approach to sourcing and verification is set out in our Sourcing & Fact-Checking Policy.
Named bylines and author accountability
Our articles are written by named members of our newsroom, and our standard is that each article carries the name of the person who wrote it. As noted above, a small number of legacy articles were published under older, generic accounts that we are retiring in favor of named human bylines. A byline is a statement of accountability. It tells you who stands behind the reporting and gives you a way to learn about that writer’s background through our Authors page. Where a contributor has relevant professional experience or credentials, we note that in their biography rather than in claims attached to individual articles.
Unnamed and anonymous sources
Our food-safety reporting relies on named, official, on-the-record sources (the agencies, notices, and studies we cite and link). We do not currently rely on anonymous or confidential sources. If that ever changes for a specific story, we will explain to readers why a source could not be named and what we did to establish that the information was reliable.
Independence and commercial relationships
We aim to report on food safety accurately and in the public interest, regardless of any commercial relationship. We also believe readers are entitled to know about relationships that could reasonably be seen as affecting our coverage, so they can weigh our reporting for themselves.
Food Poisoning News has a financial and organizational relationship with Ron Simon & Associates, a law firm that represents people in food-poisoning cases, and several of our contributors are affiliated with that firm. We describe the nature and extent of that relationship (and what it does and does not mean for our journalism) on our Ownership & Funding page. We do not claim to be free of commercial ties, but we do claim to disclose them.
Conflicts of interest
We disclose relationships that could reasonably be seen as a conflict of interest rather than leaving readers to discover them. Contributor affiliations, including affiliations with Ron Simon & Associates, are disclosed on our Ownership & Funding page and, where relevant, in author biographies. Where a story touches directly on a matter connected to one of these relationships, we take particular care to keep the reporting grounded in the official record and to disclose the connection.
Labeling news, opinion, and promotional content
We distinguish news reporting from opinion and from any sponsored or promotional material. Where content is sponsored or promotional, our standard is to label it clearly so that it is not mistaken for independent news reporting.
Many older articles on this site carry legacy promotional blocks (standardized calls to contact a law firm) inserted into the body of news posts in earlier years. We are establishing a process to remove these legacy blocks so that our news coverage is clearly separated from promotional and advertising content. This cleanup is not yet complete across our large archive of past articles.
Minimizing harm
Food safety is a matter of public health, and we weigh the public’s need to know against the privacy and dignity of the people affected by an outbreak or illness. We treat the people in our stories as human beings deserving of respect, and we are cautious about identifying private individuals, including patients and families, when doing so is not necessary to inform the public.
Accountability, corrections, and reader feedback
We are accountable to our readers, and we correct our mistakes openly rather than quietly. We do not make significant factual changes silently. When we correct an article, we tell readers what was wrong and what is now correct. Our full process (how we handle corrections, clarifications, updates, and retractions) is described in our Corrections & Clarifications Policy.
We welcome reader feedback, questions about our accuracy or fairness, and reports of possible errors. The best way to reach our newsroom is through our contact page. If you believe we published something inaccurate, please include a link to the article and the specific detail you think is wrong, and we will review it and respond.
Last updated: July 9, 2026. Questions about these standards? Reach our newsroom through our contact page.