What it is
A register of businesses serving the food industry: ingredient and packaging suppliers, testing laboratories, certification bodies, and regulatory and labelling compliance consultants. Entries are paid for by the business listed.
It is published alphabetically. Every entry is marked as a paid entry. There is no score, no badge, no star, no comment from this newsroom and no order of merit. It is not a ranking, it is not a recommendation, and inclusion does not mean we have assessed anyone's work.
Who it is for
Food businesses, not shoppers. It is deliberately separated from everything shopper-facing on this site, it is not linked from any article, and no entry will ever appear inside editorial content.
That separation is the whole design. A consumer publication that sells listings to the industry it writes about has to make the boundary structural rather than declaratory, and the boundary here is that the register is a different audience, a different page and a different product.
Sold on disclosed, verifiable facts
An entry consists of facts we can verify before publication, not of marketing copy. Registered company name and number, trading address, year of incorporation, the services offered described without superlatives, a named contact with a job title, and, where the business holds accreditation, the accreditation body and the accreditation number. For testing laboratories and certification bodies that means the UKAS accreditation number and the scope it covers.
An entry that cannot be verified is not published, and the fee is returned in full.
Current status
There are no entries published. We would rather say that than fill a register with businesses that never asked to be in it, which is the common practice in this field and the reason most trade directories are worth nothing to anyone.
Criteria and rates
The admission criteria, the prices, what the money cannot buy and what we refuse to list at any price are all published on criteria and rates.