How this site is funded
An agency publishes this. Here is exactly what that means, what can be paid for, and what cannot.
The Straits Pantry is published by Leanx Digital, a marketing agency whose clients include food manufacturers. That is a commercial conflict, and the only sensible thing to do with it is state it plainly and explain exactly how it is handled.
This page is the full version. If anything here turns out not to be true in practice, it is a fault worth reporting.
Who pays for this
Leanx Digital publishes and runs the site. Tropicor Foods, our founding partner, paid for the build and sponsors it, as set out below. There is no other backer, no grant and no parent publisher.
The commercial return we are looking for is twofold. The site demonstrates the kind of work we do, which brings us clients. And it carries paid placements, described below, which food businesses can buy.
Tropicor sometimes suggests topics, and where an article names one of their products, that sentence says so and the link is marked sponsored. Nobody else pays to appear in an article.
What can be paid for
All of them are labelled where they appear, and all outbound links in them carry a sponsored attribute, which tells search engines the link is commercial and should not be treated as an editorial recommendation.
A paid listing in the suppliers directory. The directory carries both paid and editorial entries and each one says which it is. What the fee buys is verification: we check that a paying manufacturer holds the certifications it claims before the listing goes up, and we remove it when a certificate lapses. Editorial entries are added because they are relevant, nobody pays for them, and we do not audit them. A paid listing does not rank above an editorial one on merit, only on the page.
Partner features. Longer pieces produced with a company — a factory walkthrough, an interview, a process explainer. These carry a label at the top saying who they were made with. They are not filed alongside editorial articles and they do not appear in the section indexes.
Section sponsorship. A credit at the top of a section and its articles, saying who supports it. It is a fixed, labelled slot. It buys no say over what appears in that section and no mention inside the writing, and the sponsor sees pieces at the same time as everybody else, which is to say on publication.
Nothing else. We do not sell links inside existing articles, and we do not accept payment to change something already published.
What a sponsored link means here
Where a link is commercial we mark it rel="sponsored". That is the standard way of telling a search engine that money changed hands and the link should not count as a vote.
It makes no difference to you as a reader — the link works exactly the same way. It matters because a publication that passes ranking credit to whoever pays it is not a publication, and we would rather not become one.
How editorial decisions get made
What gets written about is decided mainly by what people ask and what is missing elsewhere. Our founding partner sometimes suggests subjects; we take one on only when readers are already searching for it, and it is written under the same rules as everything else. Much of this site covers subjects no client of ours sells into at all.
Three rules, and they are the ones that actually constrain us:
We do not name a single company in body copy as an example. If a point genuinely needs a company attached, it goes to the directory, where the commercial relationship is visible. An article that names one supplier as the illustration is an advert with footnotes, however true the surrounding paragraph is.
The exception is a piece about a product category itself, where the reader's question is which product to buy. There we name several, including ones with no commercial connection to us. Any product made by a commercial partner is labelled as such in the sentence that names it, and its link is marked sponsored.
We recommend the better option even when it is not a client. This is the one that matters. A directory that only ever contains people who paid is a listing service. A publication has to be willing to say that the cheap thing is fine, that a competitor does it better, or that you do not need the product at all.
Corrections are published, not quietly edited. If we get something wrong, the fix says that there was a fix.
What we are not
We are not a certification body, a laboratory or a regulator, and nothing here is a substitute for checking with one. The halal and food business sections in particular describe how processes work in general terms. For a decision that carries legal or financial consequence, go to the authority itself.
We are also not independent in the sense a newspaper is. There is no editorial board, no separation between the commercial and editorial sides of the business, and no external oversight. What there is, is this page and the rules on it.
The founding partner
Tropicor Foods funded the build of this site. In return they hold the founding partner position, which is a single slot, awarded once, and not available again.
It consists of a credit in the footer of every page, sponsorship of the Food Business section, and a permanent listing in the suppliers directory at no charge. All three are labelled where they appear and all the links carry a sponsored attribute.
Two things it does not include, and they are the ones worth stating. It does not buy what an article says: the editorial rules above apply to the founding partner exactly as they apply to everyone else. And it does not buy the absence of criticism. If Tropicor does something worth reporting in a subject this site covers, it gets reported.
Tropicor also makes products in some of the categories we write about, among them calamansi puree and a yeast extract spread. Where one of those products is named in an article, it is named alongside alternatives, the same sentence says who makes it, and the link is marked sponsored.
Other companies can buy directory listings and section sponsorships. They cannot buy the footer.
Our own clients
Some companies mentioned or listed on this site are Leanx Digital clients. Where that is the case it is marked on the listing, or in the sentence that mentions them.
Clients can suggest subjects, as our founding partner does. Being a client does not decide what an article says about them, and it does not keep anyone out of one. If a client does something worth criticising in a subject we cover, the criticism runs.
Data and tracking
We use standard web analytics to understand which articles people read. We do not sell reader data, and we do not pass individual reader information to the companies listed here.
Where the newsletter is concerned, an address given to us is used to send the newsletter and nothing else.
Getting in touch
Corrections, complaints about anything on this page, and enquiries about listings all go to the same place. We would rather hear that we have slipped than not.