Don't Eat Poop! A Food Safety Podcast

DEP E100
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Bill Marler: No, I mean, I put up with clients approval on a Marler Clark, Vimeo channel. There's lots of, you have to kind of page through it. Cause there's like 150 videos, but you, you know, if you get into it, there's a number of short clip, five, 10 minute videos of victim stories. And that I think are obviously pretty powerful, you know, because I think it's important, you know, for me, I think it's important.

People have. Their voice, because I think it's helpful for healing, but I also think to the extent you can get through to people on the other side to really understand the impact on these families.

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 Ragusi for a deep dive into food safety. It all boils down to one golden rule.

Don't eat poop. Don't eat poop.

Matt Regusci: Hello, hello, Francine. And hello, hello, Bill. Hello. We were just talking about this.

This is our 100th episode. Crazy 100th episode.

Bill Marler: Do you guys do anything other than talk to each other on this platform? Do you actually Do you anything?

Francine L. Shaw: What kind of question is that Bill?

Matt Regusci: Yeah. Do you think that's two people?

Is that what you do on your platform? Yes, we do. We interview people. So it's either Francine and I talking to each other or interviews like we've done with you.

Francine L. Shaw: We've actually started speaking live at different conferences and things throughout the country, which is really exciting doing webinars for different organizations. So that has come out of this podcast. So that is, that's very exciting for us because we never knew where this was going to go.

Bill Marler: Yeah, no.

Great job. You've done a great job.

Matt Regusci: So Francine was, we were trying to figure out a whole bunch of different things to do for the hundredth episode. I know the people that have been listening to this. I've known that Francine and I have been talking about it, talking it up for the last few episodes, and in those we're like, and we're going to have something, and we really did not know what we were going to have.

We had so many different ideas of what to do, but Francine was like, Hey, maybe we can get Bill Marler to interview us.

That might be interesting since it is his job to ask people questions. And so Bill was like, yeah, sure. This'll be fun. And then Francine started getting worried. And I started getting worried that the type of questions Bill usually asks are more interrogative questions.

Hopefully this won't be a hostile takeover of our show, but Bill, thank you so much for being here and everybody listening, by the way, we have no clue what Bill is going to ask us. And so this was just like our fun idea for a hundredth episode, a hundred episodes as. Crazy.

Bill Marler: No problem. Hey, Matt. What's your favorite color?

Matt Regusci: Blue.

Bill Marler: See, I knew that. And Francine?

Francine L. Shaw: Pink.

Bill Marler: Pink. See? See how easy this is?

Francine L. Shaw: Vibrant, bright pink.

Matt Regusci: Like our logo.

Francine L. Shaw: Like blue and green.

Bill Marler: Yeah. Hey, so, you know, I've thought about that. And first of all, thanks for having me on and thanks for the work you guys do. You know, I think talking about food safety, and I've been on lots of podcasts, you know, to talk about food safety issues or you know, other things and, you know, I just think the more dialogue about it, the better. And obviously I've been around for a while since the Jack in the Box outbreak back in 1993. And, you know, I think the ability to talk about, you know, food safety and the impacts on humans is, is just really important.

And I think you, not only do you guys do that, but you also bring in, you know, perspective of the companies that are making mistakes and the companies that are doing a good job. I think the more people that talk about it, the more people will learn about it. It's a good thing. So I thank you for you guys for doing this.

Appreciate it. usually how I butter witnesses up before I start to...

Matt Regusci: you ask them their favorite color and then you give them like a bunch of kudos and then their guard gets dropped down and then you're like, where are you on the night of?

Bill Marler: So I think one of the things I'm always interested in is, you know, you guys know my sort of origin story, Francine, what's... what is your origin story for food safety?

I mean, how did you sort of wind up in a place where you wind up talking to me today?

Francine L. Shaw: So, wow, this is something that I've talked a lot about recently. I worked in the food service industry for a number of years, and this was not what I meant to be my trajectory. I had a booth set up at the Food Safety Summit.

It was the last year they were in Baltimore, and it was the year of.

Bill Marler: The Norovirus Outbreak?

Francine L. Shaw: No, the year after. It was the year after. Beautiful. I spent a fortune on this booth and it was beautiful. Lo and behold, I worked in retail, and that is not, at the time, Frank Yiannis changed this when he was working at the FDA, but at the time, that was not a retail venue.

That was not set up to be retail. That was very much a supply chain event. So I was like a fish out of water there. And my booth was set right out of the area where the speakers were speaking. And I was doing a lot of work in food safety training, which I had done for a number of years. Just, I trained like 10, 000 people in food safety, which I just fell into that, the food safety training aspect.

And as I, my booth was sitting there, it was drawing a lot of attention. A it was retail, B it was just well lit, very bright, very bright pink, bright green. And just we were drawing a lot of attention. Both Darin Detwiler and Hal King stopped to talk to me that day. And they had such a profound impact on me that day that it changed the trajectory of my career.

I decided at that point that I wanted to do more and become more involved. I wanted to have more of an impact. And I literally that week came up with a plan to start moving my career in a different direction and to do more than training, all because of the conversations that I had with those two men.

And I don't know if they hadn't stopped and had that, those conversations with me that day.

Matt Regusci: So I just like the same year that you and I connected? Or was it shortly thereafter that you and I connected?

Francine L. Shaw: Shortly thereafter. It is the result of me writing the articles that I had started to write because I knew that I had to do something to become recognized to make this happen.

So I started writing articles for the local paper and I literally put a plan in place. How am I going to make this happen? How am I going to become recognized? What am I going to do? And I knew that I, this is really funny because I knew that I had started to become noticed and make an impact when I was invited to an event for Purell, and I was actually doing work for Purell at the time.

And that still didn't hit me that I was doing something good. And I looked around the room and in the room, there were only people that I had ever seen in magazines that had written articles in magazines. And it dawned on me that these people had only ever seen me in a magazine as well. And it was like, that was a real moment.

And I'm very cognizant now of how I speak to people, what I say to people. And I know that it may change their path because those conversations very much changed my trajectory.

Bill Marler: You know, I mean, probably all your listeners know. Who those two gentlemen are, but why don't you just explain sort of who they are and why they had such an impact on you.

Francine L. Shaw: So, oddly enough, up until that day, I didn't know who they were, which is funny. But Darin Detwiler lost his son during the Jack in the Box outbreak and he is an advocate, at this point world renowned advocate for food safety. He's gone on. He turned that tragedy into just a very positive event. And it's impacted many lives throughout the world just by sharing his story and turning that into a positive thing. And Hal King is a food safety...

Matt Regusci: Before you move to Hal King anybody who wants to hear Darin Detwiler talk. There's you can just scroll through there. We've had multiple conversations with Darin Detwiler. And when you say world renowned, Darin was telling us a stat just recently that North eastern University, right? Northeastern University is where he's got doctorate. He teaches at Northeastern University and the PR team for Northeastern said to Darin Detwiler, do you know that the majority, I think the majority of what we get in terms of publicity for our university comes from you? And he was like, he chuckled.

He's so like a lot and like, no, not a lot, like over 50 percent of our publicity comes from you. And then all the other teachers make up less than 50%. So yeah, he's done a very good job of getting his story out and putting a base to food safety through telling of his story, which is absolutely amazing.

Francine L. Shaw: The Netflix documentary that you guys did was phenomenal.

Bill Marler: By the way, Emmy award winning.

Francine L. Shaw: I was like, I knew it was award winning, but it was like, I watched all those award shows. Sorry. So yeah, and that was, that was fabulous. But keep in mind, back at that time, When he had this impact, he's established a lot of that since then.

So, yeah, Hal King has worked for the CDC. He worked for Chick-fil-A, helped Chick-fil-A develop a lot of the programs that they have in place. He's a food safety expert. Just, I can't talk enough about Hal King and everything that he's written several books, both these gentlemen have written several books.

I think the best thing that I can say about both of these men is that they are very nice human beings.

Matt Regusci: Yes.

Francine L. Shaw: They are very nice human beings, and that's the bottom line. They've both become friends since then, which if somebody would have ever said to me at that point one day that you1ll consider these men friends and colleagues. I had no idea, they don't even know who I am, but it's just crazy how life can change.

And if you really want something, what you can accomplish.

Bill Marler: So Matt, Francine was shown in magazines and probably the only place you were, were on the walls at the post office. So, other than that, what's your sort of origin story?

Matt Regusci: Yeah, so, I went to college for organized leadership and my degree was an emphasis in change management in organizations.

Worked with my grandpa in dairy consulting. He did a lot of studies for dairy consulting and he was looking for like during high school, college worked with him, helped write up all of his research. He's Swiss. He was telling just passed and he was like my dad. I actually changed my last name to him very close to him.

He had a huge impact on me, wanted me to take over his business, but I didn't really. My wife was not interested in being at dairy all the time or having me come home smelling like a dairy every day. But I love the aspect of going around and helping farmers. Loved that. And right out of college, I got basically recruited into PrimusLabs and they told me my job was to learn how to sell electrons.

And I was like, sell electrons? They said, yeah, we have this database. And by the way, this is like 2004. So this is early, early on in technology where technology is really starting to get to masses in terms of B2B and they said we have this database that's used to track compliance information, food safety audits.

There was no GFSI back then. This is just like normal food safety, GMP, GAP type audits, uh, good agricultural practices, good manufacturing practice audits, laboratory testing for pesticide and micro. We have this thing, but we don't really know how to grow it and make it bigger. And so I was able to work with Cisco and Cisco Foods took and we built this huge database to track the supply chain for food compliance and we called the company Azzule.

So I was a co founder of that. That was like the first major that everybody talks about putting their data into systems. That was the first major database that actually track stuff. And I know. Build a little bit about this since Bob tried to use this in his defense and all this stuff, all the data we have.

And so yeah, so I was the initial product designer and co founder of Azzule. And then after that, going through different outbreaks and really being front and center in these outbreaks. It changed from this job slash career. You're young to being like, Hey, what I do in food safety, by the way, this is new to food safety, right?

Like we're all talking about this 20 years later, but in the nineties and early two thousands, Very few companies were really implementing food safety practices. And so it was this, is this going to take traction? Is this really real? And when I saw the impact of what foodborne illnesses does to children and that, that literally I could make an impact in that, that changed instantly to being a job slash career, to being a passion.

And then it was, well, how do I grow this? How do I work with my team on growing food compliance?

We, my partners and I have always had a longstanding obligation to our employees that no one company can equal more than 8 percent of our revenue at a certain point in time. That's like that magic number that if you have to fire a client.

You don't have to lay people off that we for that business that I was in when we were going out nodding people and because we had to fire clients or get fired by clients for not altering data. Like that's... when you see sometimes food safety companies and you're like, my gosh, how did that company get that score?

Sometimes it's because they're like literally a certification printing machine. So my partners and I have seen that in the past where companies like our competitors were just. not really going in or going in and not doing a great job. And so that's when we got out of that business was when that became the big deal.

And then we were looking at, Oh, then my job was, how do I then help the industry further utilizing the skills that I have to grow food compliance, not just food safety anymore now that I'm running Ellipse Analytics with Clean Label Project. It's food safety, but it's also looking at contaminants. Like that was never part of my job.

My job was always like, I always thought my job was to keep people from dying acutely to E. coli, salmonella, listeria, etc. Not so much dying slowly, by having a bunch of exposure to heavy metals and pesticides and stuff. And so then I now just with more and more data and research, that's becoming more interesting as well.

How do we save people from long term effects of consuming a lot of junk?

Bill Marler: Well, and then, you know, we've seen, you know, recently a real uptick in interest in not only junk in the sense of chemicals or contaminants, but also an uptick in interest in issues surrounding high processed foods. And food safety spaces, I think, in many respects, 10 years from now is going to be a lot larger than just where I am. Which is, you know, the sort of the pathogens that kill you pretty quickly, you know, to not only contaminants, but also to issues like obesity and heart disease and diabetes, which kill a hell of a lot more people. And yet we're paying very little attention. I mean, but I think, like I said, it's, I've certainly seen, you know, if you probably did an analysis, like what Northwestern did with, for Darin, you probably do analysis of news coverage on, you know, high processed foods.

I bet you see an enormous uptick just in the last couple of years. Yes. Yeah.

So how'd you guys decide to do this podcast and, you know, tell me how it's gone for the last 100 sessions.

Francine L. Shaw: Matt and I were friends for a number of years. Matt reached out to me one day on LinkedIn. I don't even know why. I don't even remember why he reached out to me years ago, one day on LinkedIn and we had worked together on a couple of different projects over the years and our conversations were very much like what you hear on the podcast saying a lot of good things during our conversations.

We should start a podcast someday. And one day I was like, let's just do it. And he said, okay. And I said, well, I know somebody that has a son. That's a producer. I'll call him. And about I don't know, three weeks later, we had a podcast.

Matt Regusci: That's by the way How most things work with Francine and I. She and I will come up with an idea and then she runs with it.

I just want to make sure everybody really truly understands this. This is how this relationship works. And then I get pulled along. Oh, I guess we're doing this. Okay. That's all right. Let's go. Yeah.

Francine L. Shaw: And so the last hundred episodes. Amazing. We didn't know how it would perform as anybody most podcasts don't succeed.

That's no secret. The large, vast majority of them fail. And when the numbers started, people were listening. We're like, holy shit. We need to be responsible for listening to us.

Bill Marler: Yes. I think I saw some statistics that you guys were, you know, had listeners in 90 some odd countries or some crazy number. Yes.

Francine L. Shaw: So yeah, we have, Oh my God. Within a short period of time, we were like number one in natural sciences on Apple podcasts. We have listeners in 98 countries.

Matt Regusci: We're in the top 100 for science in general.

Bill Marler: I, you know, I wonder if they could do like AI translation, you know, sort of immediate translation. I bet they probably have a program.

So it'd be, it'd be interesting to see how that works.

Matt Regusci: I could be meaningful for other countries listening. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I just assumed everybody speaks English.

Bill Marler: Well, that probably not since, since over half the population in China, probably don't speak English.

Matt Regusci: I'm just joking.

Bill Marler: You should look into it.

I mean, that would be if you have that broad of a reach, getting it into Spanish, Chinese at a minimum would be great.

Matt Regusci: Yeah. That's really interesting.

Bill Marler: Yeah.

Matt Regusci: We get a translation or we get a transcription. Via AI after every single time we end these episodes, it's generated. So I don't think it'd be that difficult then to plug it into some of the translations.

Bill Marler: They're sure there's a program nowadays, so yeah.

Francine L. Shaw: Our newsletter 2400 people, which is again, we've only been doing this for 2 years.

Bill Marler: Yeah, no, no, it's amazing.

Matt Regusci: And we're a niche within a niche within a niche. Like, he goes like, science, natural science and then biology and then microbiology and then food safety, right?

Yeah.

Francine L. Shaw: It's a continual growth every week, every month we see just continual growth. And apparently, according to our producer, this was a very rough year for podcasts and ours grew like 200%.

Matt Regusci: Apple changed the way that they manage downloads. They call downloads. So you have to actually, I guess before, if you had subscribed to an Apple podcast, it would automatically download every single week that the podcast came on or every single time podcast came on, it would automatically download.

Apple changed that policy to, you actually have to go in and pull up that episode in order for it to download. So a whole bunch of statistics for podcasters, dropped significantly over the last year because of that new policy where ours continued to grow. So it showed that our listeners not only have subscribed to our show, but listen week after week.

Bill Marler: How do you guys decide on your podcast guests?

Matt Regusci: That is a great question. A lot of our podcast guests have been from conferences. And then we get where we go out and we ask people specifically like you, right? Like we asked you specifically that first time that we did it. And then we get requests from people as well.

So then that depends on who they are. What's their goal of the podcast? Is their goal to go market their products just right off the bat? No, that's not really what our show is. Is their goal to provide education and entertainment? Then yeah, let's roll.

Francine L. Shaw: The interview format really shocked us because that was not our intention.

We weren't even sure it was something we would be good at. We fell into that when I sent you a message on Twitter and said, Hey, would you be interested in being on the podcast? And you said, yes. So that's how we fell into the whole interview format, honestly. And a lot of it's based on current events.

We'll reach out to people and say, Hey, would you be interested in being on the podcast? That's another way we get guests. So...

Matt Regusci: I can't remember. I think you were, you're either the first person we interviewed or Darin Detwiler is the first person we interviewed, but it's one and two. And I remember because at Food Safety Summit. It was Darin Detwiler. At Food Safety Summit, right after we interviewed Darin, we walked outside and you looked at me and you were like, Hey, we're supposed to do something together.

And then I like, I'm like, yeah, that's right where we are. And so then I, you and I talk a little bit, cause you were getting your Uber to go. And then I called Francine and was like, Francine was already at the airport. And I was like, Hey, Bill actually knows who we are. We got to schedule this thing. So yeah, it was Darin first and then you were second.

You are the second person we interviewed.

Bill Marler: That's tight company. Jesus.

You know, obviously I've known Darin for a long, long time. And yeah, he's a great guy. And, you know, yeah, I, I've always been, I think, mostly impressed that, and I think it's a rare person because I've represented, you know, thousands and thousands of families over the years.

It's really a rare person who sort of can get up every day and relive probably the most painful experience of their life. And to do it in a way that, you know, makes for a positive experience for those people that listen to it. So it's a rare gift. And, and I don't know if Darin gets enough credit for that, but I certainly have a great deal of admiration for him because, you know, so many of my clients completely understandably want to hide from that reality, especially losing a child.

Right. It's pretty hard.

Matt Regusci: Well, and it creates conflict for, it creates conflict in a lot of ways, right? Because it's very rare for one to be one for both people in a couple, mom and dad to be like, you know what? I'm going to use this to make a difference. I think we need to use our son to make a difference or daughter to make a difference in the world.

Every day, let's wake up and relive this. Two people on board for that is very hard. And so, yeah.

Francine L. Shaw: Well, and from there, we've had a lot of tremendous guests on the podcast. We've had some really fabulous people. So we're appreciative to everybody that has.

Bill Marler: That's great. That's great. Well, you know, I mean, I think there's, you know, there's a lot of stories to tell and I do think that there's a balance between sort of rubbing people's face in the pain and the horror of losing somebody or having a child who's severely disabled or going to lose their kidneys based on a product that they, you know, they failed to make safe.

I think that's, it's hard. And a lot of people want to ignore it, you know, including recently I've been whacking the FDA for not coming clean to the public about a E. coli outbreak. That's has sickened 90 people in multiple, multiple states. And right now the FDA knows exactly who the supplier is and frankly, most of us in the food safety industry know who the supplier is. And that they would continue to withhold that information.

I don't know if I reported an interview that one of my clients gave to a local TV station, but it's one of the kids who developed severe HUS who's part of that outbreak. And they're being told nothing. Yeah, nothing at all. And I'll deal with that in my own way and with litigation and subpoenas and stuff. But one of the things, even though my experience is, you know, obviously different than people sort of in the industry or tangential to the industry.

It's, and part of the reason why I think these podcasts and media is important to get these stories out is, is that I think kind of like. Francine, you know, you having an experience with two people changes your perspective. I think being transparent with information, accurate information, changes people's behavior and changes people's trajectory.

And I think sometimes where you have somebody like Darin Detwiler and his wife willing to tell that story, You need to have those stories out there and people who are part of the industry, part of the reason why you can make food safer, listening to those stories, because even though they're hard, I think they're real important, real important.

Francine L. Shaw: To your point, the episode that we did where we read the letter from the widow of one of the individuals from the Boar's Head. Outbreak somebody reached out to me that writes articles works in the industry and beverage industry and has an outlet to a lot of people. He actually interviewed me and wrote a story said up until I heard that episode, I was one of those people where this is just another story. It never really resonated till I heard that episode and all of a sudden, I don't know what happened, but it just clicked and I've got a wife and two children and all of a sudden it made sense. It just, it made sense. We're going to interview him.

Matt Regusci: Did you listen to that episode, Bill? The one that we read your letter?

Bill Marler: You know, I didn't. Sorry.

Matt Regusci: You have to listen to that one. I know you listen to some of them, but that one.

Bill Marler: Uh, I listen to a lot of them, but, uh... Yeah.

Matt Regusci: Cause I, you made comments about certain things where I'm like, Well, he actually does listen to the show, but, uh, That one was probably one of our shortest episodes we ever did because at the end of it, Francine and I were just emotionally done.

We were just done and I had read, skimmed through the letter ahead of time and I was like, Francine, I, we have to just, we have to riff on this. We have to do this. And I read the letter in its entirety. I had to make some theatrical decisions on my own with all the redaction that you did, but I read this thing and Francine and I are interjecting in through this and you could hear in that.

How she and I our voice's cracking. Yeah, as we're trying. It is so powerful. And I don't, I don't want to tell you how to run your business or anything, Bill, but I'm going to tell you how to run your business. Have more of those go on Food Safety News because, because we'll read them. Yeah. I'll make a promise to you.

We'll read them because so many people came to us on post email to Francine and I on and message us on LinkedIn stuff saying, Oh, my land that just hit home. Like, Now I really truly know what I'm doing when I go out and I stop a line because of food safety or follow up with these corrective actions because of food safety.

It's tedious work. Food safety is day in and day out tedious, painful work that you get beat up on all the time. You're not the one people want to see on a daily basis. So why do you do it? That one story, that one letter helped people.

Francine L. Shaw: It's powerful because it's real.

Matt Regusci: Yes.

Bill Marler: Yeah. No, I mean, I put up with clients approval on a Marler Clark Vimeo channel.

There's lots of, you have to kind of page through it cause there's like 150 videos, but you, you know, if you get into it, there's a number of short clip 5, 10 minute videos of victim stories and that I think are obviously pretty powerful, you know, because I think it's important. You know, for me, I think it's important to let people have their voice because I think it's helpful for healing.

But I also think to the extent you can get through to people on the other side to really understand the impact on these families, it's devastating. Each of you guys, we all had sort of that moment where something changes in you. And I remember for me, you know, even though the Jack in the Box case was brutal, you know, with all the illnesses.

I remember there was a E. coli outbreak at a water park outside of Atlanta in 1996. And I happened to be speaking at a conference. And I'd have been 1990, maybe it was 97. And I was speaking at a conference in Atlanta and I just given this talk and I was kind of walking out the door and there was a reporter and says, Hey, you must, you know, something about E. coli. And I'm like, well, yeah, he says, you know, we're having an E. coli outbreak at a water park outside of Atlanta called Whitewater. Not having anything to do with the Clintons. And so, so, you know, they said, can we talk to you? And I said, sure. So wound up that I wound up representing a lot of those folks.

And there was one family that had a two year old child who was with severe HUS. And they had asked me to come visit them. So I had flown back to Seattle and I turned around and flew back. And got there and the next day they made the decision to take the child off life support. And so I was at the hospital at the time.

And so I, I was, they asked me to be with them when they did that. And in 1998, You know, I had a six year old, a five year old, and my wife was pregnant. And so it didn't take a whole lot to realize just not only how important my job is to take care of these people, but how important, you know, your guys jobs are to prevent me from having work to do, which I think is pretty much when sort of my brain clicked into what I could do within my space to try to effectuate change.

And, you know, that's in many respects, I mean, you know, not that this matters, but, you know, especially pre COVID I was on the road multiple times a month, given talks in places... at some fancy conference in Beijing to a health department in the middle of nowhere in Wyoming, and just going and telling people basically why it's a bad idea to poison people.

And that's been been a message that, you know, I've been hopefully getting across to people for at least the last 25 years.

Francine L. Shaw: So tell us a little bit about what's happening with Food Safety News.

Bill Marler: So, you know, I started Food Safety News in 2000 to sort of fill a gap, you know, the Food Safety Modernization Act was moving through the House, probably maybe the last bipartisan piece of legislation we've ever seen, except maybe naming a post office. And it was kind of stuck in the Senate, but it was also at the same time, many of the big newspapers, Washington Post, New York Times, you know, LA Times, Chicago News Tribune, all had been sort of ratcheting back with people covering food safety and essentially it was not getting covered.

And so, you know, I started Food Safety News with the idea that it would cover essentially what was going on in food safety, but a lot having to do with the Food Safety Modernization Act and why that was important. And so Helena Bottermiller, who's gone on to be at Politico for a long time and now has her own newsletter called Food Fix, she moved to Washington, D. C. and became our Washington, D. C. Bureau. And during the Food Safety Modernization Act, I testified and had flu clients in to testify and there Helena was sometimes the only press person in a room, you know, watching what Congress was doing. And so, you know, and it's grown from no subscribers to, I think we were pressing 60, 000 subscribers and then varies between two and a half and 4 million page views a month, which is pretty stunning. And it's seen all over the world. And we've gotten a lot of kudos from both the industry, consumer groups, government, and get a lot, fortunately get a lot of people routinely doing op-eds, which has been great, but. You know, probably a year and a half ago, my almost to be son in law, who he now is my son in law, was telling me the statistics because apparently a lot of those statistics are available on Food Safety News or through various Google algorithms.

And he was like, you know, you got all these page views. And he goes, how do you fund this? I'm like, well, I write checks every month and have been for 16 years. And he goes, you have four reporters on staff, full time reporters. And then we, you know, every once in a while, you know, we'll pay for another stuff.

And so I've been doing that out of my own pocket. For since 2008, we had a few ads that we did, but the reason why we had to do the ads was not because I wanted to make money. It's because in order to get credentials to be on the Hill, to be part of the, you had to show press credentials. You had to show, yeah.

Press credentials. You had to show some revenue outside a personal person writing checks. And so we did that and frankly, it was not something that was obviously super important, but in any event, so I'll be 68 this year.

I am not retiring and I haven't run out of money, but I'm trying to figure out a way to make Food Safety News sustainable.

And so, because I think it's an important. I think it's important. Other than saying that Marler Clark sponsored it. It's not like, a law firm's website. You know, we don't have ads or call this lawyer or, you know, blah, blah, blah. It's, it's been pretty straight about that, but I'm looking for a way to make it so there's a platform for food safety long after I sort of move on.

And we've stepped into advertising and that's been bringing in about half the revenue needed to sustain Food Safety News, which is great.

Matt Regusci: You mean like Google advertising, right? Google.

Bill Marler: Google advertising. We got mostly people were very positive, but you know, obviously some people want everything for free and don't understand the, or they do understand the economics of it, but say, well, Bill, you've made so much money, you should just keep writing checks.

And I get that, you know, I understand, but obviously that's not going to be a sustainable thing in the long run. So we started doing that and we're also in the process of turning it into a 501(c)(3). It's a non profit. So we, so people who do do donations and we did a little donation thing for one month and got almost 15, 000 in donations just in one month.

And so I think there's a place for this and I think we can come up with different strategies to grow it because I think they do a spectacular job of covering things. And we got Joe's in Europe. We got Dan in Denver, uh, Coral and Kansas city, you know, and we got Jonah in West Virginia. So, we're kind of covering the time zones, but you can see that we have the opportunity to do more.

So I'm pretty excited about it and we'll just sort of see how it plays out, but it may be that I'm still helping subsidize it in a different way as it moves forward, which is fine. But I think it's going to be an interesting play to see if we could come up with a formula to have a, I think a needed thing in the industry sustain itself.

So that's, that's kind of where we are.

Matt Regusci: I agree. I agree. So instead of it, just being you writing checks to keep this thing afloat, it's time for it to be afloat on its own. And you've gotten to the point where it can be, it totally should be able to be that you don't want to, I don't know, maybe you do write in your will.

Hey kids, go. Here's all the money, but you need to continue writing checks to Food Safety News every single month. They may not want to do that. And so, yeah, I'm not saying you're going to die anytime soon. So don't want to get the industry too excited, but at some point in time, that's going to happen. And that's when things like that's what other organizations die.

And so it's a great way for you to leave the legacy sustainable on its own in the longterm. But that was a really morbid way of saying, Congratulations, Bill.

Bill Marler: No, no, no, next step.

Francine L. Shaw: Really, congratulations. I just, you reminded me of something. When I started writing those articles for trade magazines, it was easier to start writing for some than it was for others.

And I had a goal, and that goal was to be in Food Safety News within 12 months when I started writing for those trade magazines, because I knew it wasn't going to be easy to get my article into Food Safety News, and you just reminded me, you just reminded me of that. I did it.

Bill Marler: Yeah. Yeah. No, it's.

Francine L. Shaw: I was so excited.

My God, when my article was in Food Safety News, it was like, I was so freaking excited.

Matt Regusci: All right, so before we end. Is the  501(c)(3) done? Can people donate to that now? Almost, almost. It's perfect.

Bill Marler: Yeah, almost. So.

Matt Regusci: We have to stay in touch because I want to make sure that Francine and I are telling everybody when they can go donate to the 501(c)(3) and all.

Bill Marler: There'll be some fanfare and whatnot, so.

Matt Regusci: Awesome. Wait, well, we know we want to be cognizant of your time and for the 100th time, don't eat poop.