Conflict-of-interest policy

The Initiative's work is only useful if it is — and is seen to be — independent of the products and entities it evaluates. The policy below describes the structural arrangements we have committed to, the per-publication disclosures we make, and the individual disclosures Initiative researchers make.

Structural commitments

• No commercial funding from evaluated products. The Initiative does not accept money, in-kind support, equipment, or paid research access from any commercial dietary assessment product, or from any entity with a material financial interest in the products we evaluate. See our funding statement.
• No commercial NDAs. We do not enter commercial non-disclosure agreements that would constrain what we are able to publish. We evaluate commercial products through their public-facing surfaces.
• No pre-publication review by parties with a financial stake. Vendors of evaluated products do not see manuscripts in advance. They are welcome to respond to our published results through the normal channels (post-publication letters, our commentary section, formal correction requests).
• No certification, no endorsement. The Initiative does not certify, endorse, recommend, or rank products. We publish accuracy evidence; readers form their own judgments. We will decline requests to use Initiative work in marketing materials, and we will publicly correct misrepresentation of our findings.

Per-publication disclosures

Every Initiative publication carries two short statements at the end:

• A funding statement identifying any external funding for that specific work, or — where there is none — the default text: "No external funding was received for this work."
• A competing-interests statement identifying any financial or non-financial relationships of the listed authors that a reasonable reader might consider relevant to the work.

Individual researcher disclosures

Initiative researchers disclose individual financial relationships (consulting, speaking honoraria, advisory roles, equity holdings, paid expert testimony) on their profile pages and in the competing-interests statement of any publication for which the relationship is potentially relevant. Routine academic activity is not separately disclosed.

The disclosure horizon is the trailing 36 months. Older disclosures are retained on profile pages for transparency.

Where this policy can fail

No policy fully eliminates the possibility that a researcher's prior career relationships, methodological preferences, or unconscious assumptions shape what they study and how they report it. We address this through pre-registration of protocols, public release of code and weighed-food data, the labelling of every reported accuracy number as either vendor-reported or independently-replicated, and the open invitation to other groups to replicate our findings and publish disagreements. We treat replication failures as informative — when our work fails to reproduce, we say so with the same prominence as a confirmation.

Reporting concerns

Concerns about an undisclosed conflict of interest, a misreported accuracy number, or any other ethical concern about Initiative work can be sent to the address on our contact page. Substantive concerns are reviewed by Initiative staff outside the named author list of the publication in question.