Don't Eat Poop! A Food Safety Podcast

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Bill Marler: I remember there was a couple that we'd had over for dinner, like several times, and I just happened to mention just, Hey, isn't it weird we've never been invited over to their house for dinner? And she just, she looked at me and she goes, they're afraid. And I'm like, what? She goes, yeah, they're afraid to feed you.

intro: Everybody's gotta eat and nobody likes getting sick.

That's why heroes, toil in the shadows, keeping your food safe at all points from the supply chain to the point of sale. Join industry veterans, Francine l Shaw and Matt Reci for a deep dive into food safety. It all boils down to one golden rule. Don't eat poop.

Don't eat poop.

Bill Marler: Oh, how come we're not like out to dinner with a, like a good bottle of wine and, and then we can, Hey, that's a good way to start this.

So [00:01:00] let's pretend we're all out to dinner. Okay. That's a great idea. Listen, we're out to dinner at a nice restaurant. Yeah. What kinda restaurant? Francine.

Just pick one.

Matt Regusci: Anything with chicken and salad, right? Francine.

Francine L Shaw: Chicken and salad. Sure. Let's go with chicken and salad.

Bill Marler: So, no. So we go to, let's go say we go to a nice restaurant. Okay. So what's Bill gonna order? So he is gonna order, he's not gonna order a salad because, especially Romaine, he's gonna order cooked vegetables of some sort and he is gonna order a steak.

Well done. Boom. I'm done. What, Matt, what are you ordering?

Matt Regusci: If we're on a steak house? Yeah. Steakhouse. I would order, get all kinds of stuff. Yeah, I would order a rib eye, medium rare. And I would probably order a potato. I'm a meat and potato type of guy. And asparagus love the aspa. Like asparagus or brussel sprouts.

Bill Marler: Love that. Brussel sprouts. I'm a brussel sprout guy. [00:02:00] So Peter, I know 'cause I've had dinner with him a bunch. But Peter, we, there was a restaurant here on the island and Peter just loved to order the elk burger, didn't you, Peter?

Peter Gustafson: Yeah, great source of protein. Not the most tasteful thing. No. Someone was mentioning fried chicken earlier.

I could go for a good, kinda a good fried chicken with some mashed potatoes and gravy and other fixing on the side. It's getting cold here in DC and that sounds good. But yeah.

Matt Regusci: We'll treat you like my kids who don't like to eat at a steakhouse. And what we'll do is we'll stop by and drive through KFC.

Let you eat that while we eat our. While eating this, while we're eating the steak that great. We go into a really fine restaurant and Peter's got like his KFC pulling his fried chicken out, his mashed potatoes.

Bill Marler: And his Chef Boyardee.

Peter Gustafson: Yeah. No, I don't know. I love the good. I love the good ribeye steak.

Bill Marler: Peter. In DC you've got that famous fried chicken place just down the [00:03:00] street between you and the Capitol. What's that? It's a place where Obama used to go. It's not forgot with the one name. It's Elson in Seattle. Yeah, whatever that one's called. So I know who you're talking about. I can't think of that name.

Yeah, you've never taken me, Peter. Never takes me out to dinner. No. Okay. Francine, what are you ordering?

Francine L Shaw: I'm gonna order steak, medium rare, asparagus, baked potato, extra butter and extra sour cream.

Matt Regusci: Oh, good. There are so many times where Francine and I are ordering and then we end up eating part of each other's meal.

I'm like, are you gonna eat all that Francine? Because that's looks like something I would've ordered too.

Bill Marler: If you guys order it a medium rare steak, are you assuming it's not needle tenderized?

Francine L Shaw: Oh, yes I am. Yes.

Bill Marler: Okay. Would you ask that question?

Francine L Shaw: Would I ask or would you have.

Bill Marler: A nice, nice steak restaurant and they're not needle tenderized?

Francine L Shaw: Would I ask that? No, I, [00:04:00] no, you bring up a good point. No, I would not ask that. I would not ask that. No, you, you're, you're a hundred percent correct, but I would not, and how many times have I talked about that during a training session?

Bill Marler: Yeah.

Francine L Shaw: Years go. No, I would not.

Bill Marler: All right. I think it's time for me to shut up. I'm ruining your podcast. So.

Matt Regusci: Well, we joke about this all the time about how our podcasts are generally, and I use the word generally. 25 to 45 minutes long except for when we have Bill Marler.

Francine L Shaw: Now every time I order a steak, I'm gonna have to say, was that needle tenderized? Did you, did you pin that?

Bill Marler: So Peter knows my lovely wife who I cherish and adore and everybody likes her E Everybody. Yeah.

Matt Regusci: She has to be a saint, Bill. You guys have been married forever?

Bill Marler: Well, I've been 38 years and I remember, gosh, it was probably. I think the kids were, we may have just had, Morgan and Olivia might have just had two.

And I remember there was a [00:05:00] couple that we'd had over for dinner, like several times, and I just happened to mention just, Hey, isn't it weird we've never been invited over to their house for dinner? And she just, she looked at me and she goes, they're afraid. And I'm like, what? She goes, yeah, they're afraid to feed you.

I'm like. What do you mean? And she's, they're like, what you do? And they're afraid. I'm like, it stresses them out. And I'm like. Well, anyway, so yeah.

Matt Regusci: Yeah. My wife says that all the time. She's like, okay, when we go over there and it could be anywhere, right? Can you please not talk about food safety and can you please not bash people's beliefs about organic and all this stuff?

Like, I'm like, well, it's safe, it's organic. No, actually the risk increased exponentially because of their organic.

Bill Marler: Just, can I go to dinner with somebody else, Matt? So, yeah. Yeah.

Matt Regusci: That's why we have so many children now my wife takes one of them.

Okay.

So we wanna talk [00:06:00] about what's going on with Food Safety News.

So Bill, you are gonna talk about the history of Food Safety News, it's inception, all that different type of stuff, where it is from beginning to now, and then Peter. You're gonna, you're gonna talk about the future of Food Safety News, which is really exciting and kind of like when you started on, and what the goal was and how you gotten it to there.

And if Bill speaks over you, Peter, we will just mute him. Okay.

Bill Marler: I promise you, I promise not to, but I'll start. You ready? So I'm gonna answer your question, Matt, and keep it succinct. As succinct as Bill Marler can. So the idea behind Food Safety News started in 2000 6, 7, 8. It was kind of a little bit of a a process and what it really was that the foodborne illness outbreaks were just blowing up.

If you look back at the spinach outbreak and E coli [00:07:00] outbreak and PCA and all those ones back in that timeframe. And at the same time, the House of Representatives went from Republican to Democrat, and a lot of the food safety legislation that had worked on in the mid nineties after Jack in the Box had been sitting on shelves in offices for a decade or more.

Those started to kind of roll out because there was some traction and there were outbreaks because legislation loves a disaster and there were disasters, and so that was happening. But one of the things I noticed was that there was essentially no media coverage of what was going on, and that's was the genesis of the idea of having a website and we didn't really think about it as a newspaper because we didn't know if Google would index it as news. So we started the website and it was really at [00:08:00] the time, was myself, Suzanne Schreck, Dan Flynn. And then we had, I had a couple of reporters, including one guy who had won a Pulitzer Prize who he had been retired and his wife.

And so the five of us were running the paper. But one of the things we really tried to do is like distance Marler Clark, the law firm from the website 'cause I was worried that people would see it as another one of Bill Marler's PR things. And I didn't want that to happen. I wanted to show some separation and legitimacy.

But as you can imagine, back then there were these people I was paying to run Food Safety News. I then hired, or actually she was an intern, Helena Bottemiller, who you, we all know Helena Bottemiller bugged me to give her a job. So I gave her a job and then she was there for three or four months in Seattle.

And then she wanted to move to DC and I said, well, do you have a job? And she said, no. And I said, Hey, do you want to be our bureau chief [00:09:00] for Food Safety News, Washington DC? And she said, yes. And that's how we wound up being the newspaper of record of the entire thing of the runup to the Food Safety Modernization Act.

I remember testifying in Congress or and bringing clients to testify and there would be Helena at the press table and she'd be the only press there covering the stuff. Wow. It was pretty incredible. And I'm very proud. I felt very proud. And historically that's where lots of like really what was going on, the deals that were being struck and the hearings that were going on, and so that really was the sort of how Food Safety News generated over the course of time.

And we've had different people come in and come out. Dan Flynn, who was a reporter who covered me in the seventies when I was a young city council [00:10:00] member, elected at 19, Dan worked for a newspaper that covered the city council I was on. So I'd known Dan longer than I've known my wife. Dan is the longest. He's the only person I know that has put up with me for 50 years. And so, so that's where kind of everything has been.

And as we've discussed, although Marler Clark has been the sponsor, if you go back and look at news, there's very few times where, you know, it talks about lawsuits that I might've filed against companies or I've really tried to distance myself even when frankly there would be relevant news I've distanced myself. I've certainly done publishers platforms and had my say in what's going on, but that's I think, not a problem. I was

how we got to where we are today funding this project since, really since 2009. Since the beginning. It's [00:11:00] usually had between three, four or five employees. We go to conferences every year.

It's the cost every year has run between. A quarter of a million to $400,000, depending upon what we were doing between if we were going to a conference in China or the EU or something to be there. It's varied a lot and I've sent a reporter to South Africa to cover the listeria outbreak. It obviously costs money for that.

And Christmas time a couple years ago, Peter, who also happens to be my wonderful son-in-law. I think that might be the first time I actually said wonderful.

Peter Gustafson: But are we recording? Are we recording right now?

Matt Regusci: We're recording, yes. This'll be on forever. You are wonderful, Peter.

Bill Marler: But you can cut most of this out.

But Peter was, we were sitting in the, in the living room at my house and I don't know exactly how it came up, but Peter was looking at the Food Safety News numbers, how many subscribers and how many page [00:12:00] views and stuff like that. He goes, you realize you could make money on Google News? He did a rough kind of estimate and said you could probably make 30 or $40,000 a month.

I'm like, what? And so. That was the beginning of, I'll turn this over to Peter, but to me that was the beginning. It was like, I'm 66 now, 68. I'm not retiring.

I haven't run outta money, but I'm started to think about the legacy of Food Safety News and the need for it long past even all of us are moved on.

And so that has been really what I have been really incredibly thankful for Peter, just put this on his back and for the last year and a half, kind of figure out how to do that. So that's how we started and where we are. And I'll turn it over to Matt and Francine and Peter.

Matt Regusci: Yeah. Well, and before we move over to Peter, how we [00:13:00] figured out your world of media.

That Food Safety News is the ongoing outbreaks, tracking those outbreaks, and also in-depth investigative reporting. And there's a lot of guest columnists that will come on and do articles based upon their knowledge and all this different type of stuff. And it's very separate from Bill Marler. Now, occasionally we'll see an opinion piece from you on Food Safety News, but really Food Safety News is just what is happening in the world.

And like you said, kind of Canada, US centric, but also with the Australia Ster case and all that different type of stuff. What's going on in the world with food safety. Your blog, Marler blog is where you riff. Yeah, that's where you are constantly riffing about what your views are of the industry, and it's very different than Food Safety News.[00:14:00]

Bill Marler: Yeah. Every once in a while I'll certainly put an opinion piece on Food Safety News, but I do leave the deep Bill Marler angst for Marler Blog.

Matt Regusci: Yes. Yeah. And if nobody's ever read Marler Blog, you can definitely understand what he means by the deep Marler angst. And so you and I have been talking about this, Francine, you and I have been talking about this for a couple years.

We were able to meet Peter recently, but really, truly what, why we were like encouraging you to do this future as well is for sustainability purposes. If you get hit by a, a car tomorrow or something like that and you cease to exist. Food Safety News should not cease to exist. Marler Blog could cease to exist, but Food Safety News should not, and it's the only place really that's doing this constant, consistent, deep dive into what's going on in food safety for in the US and Canada.[00:15:00]

And a lot of other articles and pieces like CNN, like LA Times, like all those different types of articles will pull things from your investigative reporting on Food Safety News, and then have you interview to riff whatever your opinion is in those. Yeah. Two and a Yeah. But a lot of it is like Dan Flynn, Coral, et cetera. going out and finding what's going on in the world and really diving deep into it.

Bill Marler: Yeah, and that's what, to me, if there's sort of one thing or maybe one, two things that you know, that I'm hopeful for the future and is, I'll let Peter explain how that's gonna look. The things that I'm more hopeful about is coming up with a way that the people at Food Safety News can do more deep dives on stuff that needs to be looked at. That's one. So there's more I call premium content people that you know really go, oh wow, I didn't know that. And a little bit like there was a [00:16:00] really interesting, ProPublic had just did a story on the downturn of inspections from overseas inspections over the last year.

And then he has a good thing. And we could do that. He easily could have done that. And then the other thing too is really. Seek out more opinion pieces from people because there's a lot of opinions out there about food safety and what you can do, what you can't do, how you do it, blah, blah, blah. And I think creating a forum for that is also thoughtful stuff and also doing.

Again, now I'm a third attending more conferences in the US and around the world. Being able to pick up on some really interesting but perhaps obscure conference topics that don't get the kind of coverage that they deserve. And so I think there's a lot of things that I'd like to see done that I hope the new format, the new process, the [00:17:00] new iteration of Food Safety News.

It's not a desire to cut back. It's a desire to build. It's a desire to make something sustainable, better and more useful for the food safety public.

Matt Regusci: So, Peter, you're at his house in the living room. You're like, Hey, I would like to marry your daughter, and then also I can make this sustainable. Is that how that conversation went or?

Francine, did you wanna jump in with a question or.

Francine L Shaw: I can do. I wanted to say something. Bill had just said something about the opinion pieces. Those opinion pieces are important for more than one reason. Writing for Food Safety News is a big deal. That's something that if Food Safety News is very recognized and very respected.

So when I made my decision to move from industry. I've said this to you before from industry [00:18:00] to advocacy and food safety and just made that change. I knew what I had to do to become more recognized in the industry because when you're working in industry, sometimes you're not quite as recognized unless you're the Frank Yiannas's that are working in is working for the FDA, unless you're working for one of the larger brands like Wendy's or McDonald's, and it took a lot of effort for me to get where I am today.

But I had a goal and I had within X number of months, I wanted to be published in Food Safety News. That was my goal. And when you're published in a publication like Food Safety News, suddenly everybody's like, oh, she wrote an opinion piece for Food Safety News. And that leads to other publications saying, Hey, could you write an article for us?

And it certainly helps with your career and being recognized after writing an opinion piece for Food Safety News, [00:19:00] and so it provides that service, if you will as well. We don't get paid for writing those articles. People think we get paid when you write an opinion piece for Food Safety News, we don't get money monetary payments for writing those article.

So, you know, that's something else. It's a stepping stone, if you will. You know, it, it certainly helps with somebody's career when you're writing those articles.

Matt Regusci: I, yeah. One of, I remember when she.

Francine L Shaw: I was so freaking excited when that first article was published. I was so freaking excited to be published in Food Safety News.

I can't begin to tell. It was like, oh my God, I've made it.

Matt Regusci: And then that led to her writing a book. So, yeah.

Francine L Shaw: Yeah. I ultimately wrote a book.

Matt Regusci: So, yeah.

Back to that. Yeah, sorry. So Peter, Chris Christmas, you're on the couch and you're like, Hey, we can make this sustainable with Google Ads. And then how did it snowball from there?

Peter Gustafson: [00:20:00] So just I guess real quick background on who I am. So I've spent like my career working primarily at early stage B2B software startups. So that's kind of how I spent my career. That's how I approach a lot the different things. And at this point, I had just gotten laid off from this climate tech startups I was working at at the time.

As Bill mentioned, we were sitting by, the fire happened in a glass of scotch and the, he was probably talking to his account, looking at the numbers from Food Safety News, and he's like, Hey, like can you take a look at this and see if there's something here? So I think he gave me access to the Google Analytics and like email subscribers and all that stuff.

And I took a look at it and with my background I'm like, wow, like you've built a really incredible audience here. You're doing two, three, 4 million page views per month. At this point, he had 52,000 email subscribers he was sending out daily email that had a pretty good engagement. And I'm like, I don't know how much money you could make from this, but I feel [00:21:00] like you should at least be able to break even given that amount of traffic.

So that's kind of how it started. And I, he's like, what should we do?

And I was like, well, I think the first thing is that if you already have this much website traffic, let's add some Google Ads to the site. It's just, it's a programmatic ad, so essentially it's X number of cents per page view. Like given that those numbers, like we should be able to start generating 5, 10, 15, 20,000 plus a month and Google Ad revenue.

So that's kind of how I, I started and we slow rolled it. It started with one or two to test. It just kept adding to it. And over the course of that year, this is 2024 as we kinda expanded it. And you know, at that point website traffic was still around 1.6 billion pages per month. Like we were doing pretty good numbers.

There's some months where we would do 15 or $20,000 in ad revenue per month. And that still wasn't fully covering the costs to run it, but I was like, Hey, I [00:22:00] think we're on the path here. And that's how it initially started.

And then I was like, I think we also could explore being a more reader supported publication. Let's try and run a test donations campaign.

So we tried to run a donation campaign last September for think it was US Food Safety Education Month. I was like, let's roll it out. This is pre nonprofit and let's just put out a good video, good messaging. Let's try and raise like $10,000, see if folks buy into it. And we ended up raising, I think 14,000 that month.

And that's when I went to Bill and I was like, Hey, I think we should consider making Food Safety News, a separate  501 (c) (3) nonprofit, because in addition to like obviously the ad stuff, I think if we could start to solicit donations from readers, that'll also help bridge the gap to become break even essentially.

So that was the initial impetus last year. And because we had good traction with ads and we were making moves on the nonprofit, I [00:23:00] thought we were in a good position. I was like, great. Like problem solved. Let's just get this all wrapped up and Food Safety News is in the clear.

And then this little thing called AI came along and really disrupted website traffic to a degree that I think no one's ever seen in history.

The numbers are pretty startling, and I played a video at the last Food Safety's board meeting where one of the guys, the CEO of CloudFlare, who's one of the largest kind of website providers, talked about some of the data that he's seeing of like the drop in website traffic due to ChatGPT and various other things, and that really has shook Food Safety News this year, I think this year we're averaging just over 400,000 page views per month.

Whereas last year we averaged 1.6 million pages per month and every single publisher, whether it's the New York Times, Washington Post, whoever, they're seeing a decrease as well. It's just obviously relative based on to how big your viewership is. But when you talk about [00:24:00] programmatic ads, that's just, it's directly correlated with your website traffic.

So as you can imagine, that revenue came down quite a bit and it got to the point where it was like January was down, February, March was down. It was like, oh, maybe this a blip. Like maybe the news cycle is not in our favor, but it, the trend persisted into summer and I'm like, there's something here. We're not coming back to where we were. This is not going to shift.

And starting to prepare for the Food Safety News Board meeting over the summer. And I'm like, I've gotta come in with action plan of like, how do we not only just make small tweaks, but how do we fundamentally change our business model so that we can be self-sustaining? And I think when you're running any search of online publication, there's typically just two main ways to monetize, right?

Either through ads or through subscriptions or memberships. So we try the kind of ads route. That didn't work out. So I'm like, I don't have a ton of tools in [00:25:00] my toolkit and like membership and subscriptions is the next one I had.

So I started prepare for it, but I was like, before I pitched this to the board, let me run a survey.

So we ran a survey over the summer and asked our current readers like, Hey, like how important is it that FSN continues to publish on a daily basis? Overwhelmingly, that was I think 90% of people said it was very important that we kept publishing. It was like, okay, well that's square one, and then it's okay.

Given that it's important that we keep publishing daily, are you willing to contribute financially to make sure that we can be sustaining? And that was also really positive. There's a big cohort of folks in the maybe category, but if we're able to get most of the folks that are maybe into yeses. Over half of our audience is willing to support us.

So there's just a lot of really positive indicators and that's once I saw the data from the membership survey, I was like, okay, this can work. Let me figure out logistics of [00:26:00] how this can work. So anyway, I'll pause there. But that's at a high level, the various pieces.

And where we are today is that we finally got our kind of 501 (c) (3) destination from the IRS.

So, right when this episode launches in December, we'll be putting out a press release that says Food Safefty News is officially a 501 (c) (3) nonprofit organization, so you can go to the website and give a tax deductible donation. And along with that launch, we're also gonna be launching this new website that will have this kinda FSN+ membership option.

And if you want, you can become an FSN+ member and you can get ad free reading for all the articles on the website. I know we're gonna be rolling out some new premium content I'm really excited about. So yeah, I'll pause there. That's at a high level and where we're at.

Matt Regusci: Yeah, so with the premium members will not have Google Ads popping up once this goes in the subscription, which is awesome.

So [00:27:00] the user experience will be much better. And then what type of premium type of content are you looking to? What will be the difference between those that don't subscribe and those that do? Like what will be on the freemium site versus what will be behind user access, for instance. And I obviously your guys are still figuring this stuff out, so we won't, but my audience won't hold you to that.

But what are your thoughts?

Peter Gustafson: Yeah, so I think our mission as a nonprofit is to spread awareness of food safety policy, mandatory issues. So it's really important to our mission that we continue to make free important content about like recalls and outbreaks and when folks like Francine come in and write op-ed posts about the industry, that will all remain free.

As Bill mentioned, we have a writer that's based in UK who writes on issues that that are based in Europe and globally. That will be a member only benefit.

We're also be rolling out what we're calling [00:28:00] the Sunday edition, which will get published each Sunday morning, and we'll essentially go deep onto a really kind of relevant topic in the food safety space each week.

And the inspiration for this was this other publication called Tangle News, which is this or nonpartisan kind of political publication that goes deep into various political issues and they summarize in depth. Like the full context of the issue and they summarize what both the left and right are saying about the issue. And then they provide their kind of objective nonpartisan opinion to that.

And for me, that just, that approach resonated a lot. And I was like, as I was reading, I was like, oh, I wonder if we could take this concept. There's this idea in business where it's called recombinant innovation, where you take something that's working really well in one industry and you tweak it so it fits your industry.

That's what I've been trying to do with this. Take that concept and apply it to food safety because obviously there's a, whether it's SNAP [00:29:00] benefits or Right, there's a talk of like hot topics in the industry right now and I think our readership is craving, like in depth reporting that they can trust and not only talks about like our objective opinion, but also kind of summarizes what the leading folks are saying in both industry and on the government regulatory side.

And I think providing all that in one place would be highly valuable and highly relevant for readers.

Matt Regusci: Yeah. I call what you just said, rob and duplicate. I do that all the time. Rob a fantastic idea from somebody and then duplicate it.

Peter Gustafson: Well, the business school term is recombinant innovation.

Matt Regusci: There you go.

Instead of r, I thought it was called R&D. Rob & Duplicate. But that's awesome.

Peter Gustafson: And so when are your thoughts on this starting. So right now, and we're, we're planning to launch December 1st. Technology is technology, so things could always pop up, and that is our goal and we're on [00:30:00] track in this moment.

And the thought around watching December 1st is that we have a number of readers that have read FSN for 5, 10, 15 years plus at this point. And we wanna offer our long-term readers a founding member price that will be available next year when we're fully up and running. So the idea is that over the past few weeks we've been sending out a number of emails to our readers explaining the changes.

We're trying to slow roll this and over communicate kind of what we're doing and why. And the idea is that we're the, again, offering our long-term readers, this great family member deal that they can take advantage of through the end of the year. And starting next year, we'll have our regular pricing.

We're still gonna make exceptions, not exceptions. We're gonna provide discounts for folks in government and regulatory space, discounts to folks in like the academic space. We have a number of folks on our [00:31:00] list that are retired and obviously they have limited income as well. So we're, and this was also, this also came out of the survey where we asked about discounts and pricing and all of that.

The entire strategy is based around the needs of our readers, and that's a really important thing I wanna highlight is that each step that I've done, whether it was like the new newsletter that launched earlier this year, or this new membership program, we spent a lot of time doing a lot of in depth research, also serving our readers, and we're trying to put a product in front of our readers that directly resonates with what they're looking for.

Francine L Shaw: So I can give you my AARP card and get a discount? Just kidding.

Bill Marler: Yeah, and the only thing I would add to what Peter said is that what I certainly hope is that, especially with the 501 (c) (3). Thing that we can actually seek out donations from companies that Right. Are interested in the food safety [00:32:00] space that might donate 10, 20, 30 grand and get the write off, and then that money would go towards more in depth breaking news. Which would also, maybe some of it would be on the free site because it's important stuff. Maybe some of it would be on the premium site as well. But I think there's such an opportunity for more coverage because you know, the reality is this is happening not just in Food Safety News, but it's happening at The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post.

I used to know every reporter who covered food safety. And now I noticed the other day that there was an article in the Washington Post about the listeria recall that we're having presently that was written by a really nice young man in Korea for the Washington Post. And that's the reality of the news that's getting [00:33:00] out there, that's then getting picked up by AI.

And so what I hope that we're able to do is use the power of the, our readership, the power of the community of food safety. It's a real kind of an interesting community of people really. And I think using that is as a way of putting together a sustainable thing that, and continues to inform people is I think, kind of where we're trying to go.

And I commend Peter for forging ahead and running into brick walls and picking himself up and trying in a different direction. It's been very appreciative.

Matt Regusci: Yeah, and I love the sustainability aspect of it. Francine and I talk about this all the time, that the next couple episodes that are coming after this one literally came from Food Safety News and your text message to us with the LA Times article about the chicken or the poultry industry upset because other organizations are finding [00:34:00] that not only are they not meeting the USDA's crazy expectations with salmonella in percentages of the poultry, they're more of 'em actually have salmonella than they're supposed to. And so yeah, it's.

If we didn't have Food Safety News, this is very selfish of us to say this. If we didn't have Food Safety News, we have to become our own investigative reporters, and that's really exhausting. So thank you for providing this for so many years, and it needs to be sustainable. It needs to be beyond Bill Marler writing a check.

It needs to be something that's multiple generations can have at least another generation that is not sustained by you.

Bill Marler: Yep. Yep. I agree. I agree. So.

Peter Gustafson: Yeah. And one, one other thing I forgot to mention earlier is the other big kind of member only benefit is the FSN Daily newsletter will become a member benefit.

So what we're [00:35:00] gonna be doing is launching a new FSN Weekly newsletter that will get launched in early December, right when a new psychic launch that will go out. Each Monday, and then I'll summarize like the top five food safety stories from the previous week. And the thought is that if it's just a general consumer who's just curious about food safety, that cadence should feel right for them.

But if you're like a food safety industry leader and you rely on Food Safety News to be caught up and know what's going on, that's really a value add because again, we're saving folks a lot of time by summarizing those top five stories in their inbox each morning. I feel like we might get the most pushback regarding that piece, but I think I need to have something that like truly made it worthwhile to be an FSN member.

And I think that newsletter is the core thing.

Matt Regusci: Yeah, good idea. Yeah. Once this becomes, reaches the threshold of break even. It's a nonprofit, right. So [00:36:00] I think I was doing the math and if 5,000 people signed up for this, you're at about break even, which I could see way more than 5,000 people signing up for this.

So as that continues to go in, because it's a nonprofit, that's just more and more money for you guys to spend on more and more resources and bettering the overall experience for Food Safety News. So it's beyond sus making this sustainable, but it's also adding a whole lot of content or a whole lot more resources towards really going into what's going on in food safety.

Peter, you were talking about a merch store. Are we gonna be able to like buy, get the F outta FDA T-shirts and stuff. You're going through? We still have to email Bill Marler and get those.

Peter Gustafson: Don't encourage Bill. He wants to do something like that. He might be sitting out. Well, I know I just, there's a lot of logistics involved with trying to figure out how to mail out thousand different interesting [00:37:00] t-shirts and names in container.

But we will have, yeah, we've lost a new Shopify merch store that's on the website today. I haven't really talked a lot about it, but that's up there today. And that will be live on the new website as well. We might be stay tuned for details. We might be adding in some cool t-shirt or merch that will get sent out to our founding members.

As well. I was just joking because there probably would be a lot of work to double was just six of getting those out. But obviously we wanna make sure that all of our founding members, the first thousand or so that sign up initially, we wanna reward them. So we'll figure something out. But I think, yeah, we want to just have a kind of a new and fresh merch store that has things like.

FSN coffee mug, a t-shirt, even a vest, that, that sort of thing. And that we wanna provide kind of discounts for members as well. Just do a little cherry on the top type of thing. Nice.

And then just, we can put this in the description of the podcast, but just for the folks that are listening, [00:38:00] and this will be in the press release, but just for one's knowledge.

So the mission statement of Food Safety News is, it's gonna be Food Safety News, advances public health by delivering timely, accurate, and comprehensive coverage of foodborne illness, outbreaks, recalls, and regulatory developments that impact the safety of our global food supply.

So, Matt, to your point, if we, luckily, if we're able to exceed our revenue targets and we go above and beyond what's needed to pay the bills at Food Safety News, all additional revenue profit would go into supporting that cause.

So it could be as Bill mentioned, it could be us expanding our reporting or going to more conferences, or it could be us making donations to other nonprofits that are aligned with what we're trying to do. Beautiful.

Matt Regusci: We will have the link down below when this podcast comes out as well, on where to go and subscribe.

Bill Marler: Oh, and Peter, the, actually, the Food Safety News website's gonna look a lot [00:39:00] different than, well, yeah. Peter's been working hard. Redesign is gonna be pretty cool. And I think much more reader friendly for everybody, the paid or unpaid folks. So I think it's gonna be pretty interesting. So.

Peter Gustafson: Yeah, I think we're, we're moving to a newer platform called Ghost that's just a newer version of kinda WordPress and I found a guy based in Romania, this guy named Norbert, who has been building these different website themes that a lot of really cool up and coming publications have used, but found a newer kind of news template that he had developed over the summer and spent a couple of weeks going in depth and looking at all the different interviews we did with our readers, like back when we wants a newsletter.

Earlier this year, myself and a couple folks on the team, we probably interviewed 30 to 40 different FSN readers. We ask them a lot of questions about like their experience with the [00:40:00] newsletter and the website and what they typically do and what they're looking to accomplish when they come to the newsletter site.

So all of those insights from those readers were incorporated in the designs, but ultimately try to keep as much of the current flow as possible in terms of the homepage, just highlighting the top stories that you know are most recent, but then making it easier to like dive into a category if you're focused on.

With policy or global issues and easier to kind of navigate there. And then we're also adding in a little cool feature, which I'm calling like the outbreak tracker. So if you can think of going to a financial site and you're seeing like, you know, the stock ticker of what's going on, we'll be starting to highlight like the outbreaks that are going on.

Because I feel like even though we report on all the outbreaks immediately, I feel like sometimes they can get lost of like, oh, there was this outbreak we report on a week ago that's actually still active. So the idea is that like you come to Food Safety and News and right away you can see [00:41:00] where all the current outbreaks are globally and be able to dive into those.

So yeah, where to come with that. But I'm excited about the new website. It should be user friendly. And then also main thing mad is that once you're sign in as a member or more Google Ads or know more popups.

Matt Regusci: That's nice.

Francine L Shaw: Thank God. Nice.

Peter Gustafson: Yeah.

Matt Regusci: We're at, right, we're at Food Safety Consortium and Bill pulls up an article on his phone and half the object call is covered with one of the ads and he's like, everybody's fricking complaining about this, but I gotta figure out how to made for this somehow.

I'm like, just click the little arrow thing, bill. I know because I, that's how I look at Food Safety News is on my phone too. So yeah, that will be very, very, very nice.

Francine L Shaw: So basically you're really doing somewhat of a rebrand, minus the logo, you're keeping the same logo and the name and.

Peter Gustafson: And I think, yeah, I, I, that was something that I thought about, but because again, the brand is such and such a good place and people [00:42:00] recognize that FSN logo immediately because there's so many other changes going on with website and donations and memberships.

I'm like, I can't change everything all the same time. So yeah, that food safe news, brand solid.

Bill Marler: We worked on the Food Safety News tagline, all the news, the consumption, remember, whatever it says, the breaking news for everyone's consumption. Yeah. That, and the one I try I lobbied for 15 years ago is sort of a spinoff of all the news that's fit to print, that used to be the, the New York Times, like I always said, all the news that's fit to shit for food safety.

So anyway. That got canned, so nobody liked that one. So I'm might bring that, I might bring that back and put it as my tagline on my blog.

Francine L Shaw: That's as bad as I wanted to name my book something different. And you know Hal King wrote my forward and I love how King [00:43:00] and he's like fancy. And I just really don't think that's a good idea.

Matt Regusci: Yeah. And she sent it to me. And how King and I was like, this is awesome title. You should totally go with it. And Hal King was like, n no, Francine, no I cannot. You have to change.

Francine L Shaw: I don't think that's a good idea, Francine.

Matt Regusci: Alright, well on that note, everybody sign up for Food Safety News, the new subscription and we definitely are.

Francine and I are and don't eat poop.