From Losing $200k/Year To Breakeven. Hopefully

Food Safety News, a publisher that’s mostly B2B, was founded in 2009 by a lawyer specializing in food safety litigation, and has been a loss-making machine since then. 

In 2023, FSN lost about $200,000 on revenue of $16,000. That year, founder Bill Marler decided to bring in his son-in-law, Peter Gustafson, to turn the ship around.

He agreed to join FSN after seeing the numbers—2 million to 3 million page views per month, 50,000 email subscribers and 200,000 Facebook followers. And some 60% of visitors go directly to the home page—a holy grail in publishing. 

“I’m like, there’s something here. Like, you’re definitely building something, and there’s value,” Gustafson, fractional executive director and president of the board of directors, told AMO. He decided he could “figure out how to make this work—not that we’re trying to spin a profit, just to literally break even.”  

And so FSN, with a staff of about half a dozen, is in the process of transitioning to a nonprofit model to ensure its long-term sustainability. It’s also pricing ads properly now after underpricing them for years and adding subscription, donations and webinars as new revenue streams.

“It’s never been about the money for him, obviously it’s all about the cause,” Gustafson said. But to ensure its future and prepare for Marler’s eventual retirement—not to mention managing a deep plunge in traffic (From 1.6 million pages per month last year to 400,000 a month this year) after Google changed its algorithms and with AI overviews diverting traffic—FSN is changing. 

Jack in the Box

In 1993, Marler won a landmark case against Jack in the Box related to an E. coli outbreak that poisoned and killed several children. Among them was Brianne Kiner, a nine-year-old from Redmond, Wash., who ate an undercooked burger and developed hemolytic uremic syndrome. She went into a coma, her body became puffy and jaundiced, and she began to bleed from every orifice in her body.

Marler obtained a $15.6 million settlement on Kiner’s behalf. He also represented hundreds of other victims of the Jack in the Box outbreak in a class-action suit with settlements reaching over $50 million, the largest payment related to foodborne illness at the time.

The outbreak sparked a passion in Marler to provide timely reporting on food safety issues, thus was born FSN.

When Gustafson arrived at the publication, he immediately saw low-hanging fruit to tackle. He implemented programmatic ads and saw growth over several months from $5,000 to $10,000 to $15,000—with volatility given fluctuating news of outbreaks and recalls. And in September, they started a campaign calling for donations. The goal was to raise $10,000, and they raised around $14,000. That convinced Gustafson to turn FSN into a nonprofit and be able to fundraise tax-free. 

They also decided they would pivot—at some point—to subscriptions at something around $6 a month or $60 a year and offer an ad-free experience and premium offerings. They’re still figuring out the value, and late last year did a survey of readers to help guide the pricing. Among their findings:

• Newsletter subscribers were predominantly female (63% vs 31% male), with a median age of 55 to 64 years old and median income of $75,000 to $99,000. 
• Newsletter subscribers showed strong loyalty (48% subscribed for 3+ years) and preferred technical/professional content with comprehensive coverage. 
• About 16% would be willing to pay for an ad-free newsletter; 70% preferred free with ads.
• About 61% were willing to pay $1 to $5 and 30% were willing to pay $6 to $10.
• About 70% of the audience consists of professionals in the industry, researchers, scientists and regulatory agency staff. 
• The rest are consumers who have been impacted by a food safety issue and want to be made aware of different recalls and outbreaks; it is also the fastest growing segment.     

“The way that I think about the subscription for the website is that [with] the newsletter, we continue to be free, because that’s our main working engine, but the website would have just certain articles that are premium content only,” Gustafson said. “I need to ultimately bring this up at the next board meeting and get everyone’s perspective on it… because of the shift with website traffic, with AI, I feel like I can’t wait around for this.”

RSS Feeds Are Not Newsletters

Visiting the website feels like a return to 2009. The newsletter similarly was basically an RSS feed, but that’s been rejiggered away from MailChimp to Beehiv, and feels more like a Morning Brew-style email now, Gustafson said. 

“We doubled our open rate, we doubled our click rate, essentially went from like 22% open rate to 45% open rate, and like 6% click rate to like around 10%, so really strong numbers,” he said. “We’re actually starting to grow our subscribers.” 

When he arrived, he trimmed unengaged subscribers, so the list shrank from 52,000 to 44,000. They are back up to 45,000 now. 

The new sales guy has also been a breath of fresh air. The previous person didn’t view the newsletter as a separate product; he thought of it as an add on. As a result, he was pricing it at $1,000 per month. Now, FSN is charging closer to $1,000 a day. 

All told, Gustafson is aiming to generate $25k a month with $10,000 in newsletter ad sales and $10,000 in monthly webinars, and additional funds coming from Google ads, subscriptions and donations.  

“I’m really treating this as a startup,” he said. “Let’s just try things out and see what works, and for the stuff that does work, let’s double down on it, if not, let’s pivot.”  

In 2024, he managed to get to $118,000 in revenue—still far from where they need to be but more than seven times the previous year. And FSN is trying to find a balance between reaching breakeven while serving a mission. Their vision statement:

We envision a world where everyone has access to reliable food safety information, empowering consumers and industry professionals to make informed decisions that protect public health and strengthen the global food system.

“I don’t want to restrict access to this content,” Gustafson said. But “at the end of the day, it’s got to be a business model that works.”