What we promise
OUR CHARTER · UPDATED= 2026-08-22 · APPLIES TO= everything published under How to Gluten Free
There are dozens of gluten-free apps, maps and websites now, and from the outside you cannot tell which of them checks anything. A site that re-verifies every listing and a site that scraped a search engine last spring look identical on a phone. “Verified” has become a word anyone can print.
We cannot fix that for the whole internet. What we can do is say, in public and in plain words, what we hold ourselves to — so that you can hold us to it, and so that any other site that works this way has something to point at. These are the four rules. They apply to everything we publish: the country and city guides, the restaurant cards, the events calendar, recall alerts, the school and nursery material, and the Atlas map.
1Every claim carries its source and its date.
Where a fact came from, and when a person last checked it, travels with the fact — on a venue listing, in a guide, on a card, in a recall alert. Not in a footnote. Next to the claim.
Which means: you can always see how old our information is, and decide for yourself whether that is old enough to re-check.
2A person decides what counts as verified.
Software can gather, sort and flag. It never awards a tier, never calls a place dedicated, and never marks anything verified. Those words are set by a human being who looked at the evidence, or they are not set at all.
Which means: our automation is allowed to be wrong out loud, in a queue, where a person catches it — not quietly, in public, wearing a badge.
3Anything that touches safety is free.
Cross-contact information, protocols, allergen facts, recalls, the material a parent hands to a school — none of it sits behind a payment. We sell convenience, depth and delight. We do not sell the part that keeps someone well.
Which means: if a piece of information could change whether someone gets ill, it will never be the reason we ask you for money.
4A named human stands behind it.
There is a person responsible for what is published here, reachable by email, who corrects things in public and dates the correction. Not a brand voice, not a support queue, not an algorithm nobody can question.
Which means: when we get something wrong, you have someone to tell — and you can see what happened next.
Anyone can copy a map. The difficult part was never the pins — it is the discipline behind them, kept up every week, in public.
- It is not a certification scheme. We do not inspect, license, audit or accredit anyone, and there is no fee, no logo to buy and nothing to renew.
- It is not a standard for restaurants or manufacturers. It describes what a publisher owes its readers. How a venue earns a tier from us is a separate document — our methodology.
- It is not a claim to be better than anyone else. It is a claim about what we will and will not do, which readers can check for themselves.
Use it, adapt it, or put your name to it
If you run a gluten-free app, map, blog, directory or association and you already work this way, you are welcome to say so. Copy these four rules onto your own site in your own words, or write to us and we will list you here as holding to them. There is no cost, no application and nothing to sign away — and we do not gain anything from it except a slightly less confusing internet for people who have to read every label.
How to Gluten Free — since 22 August 2026. Andreas Fulde, publisher. Corrections and complaints: hello@howtoglutenfree.com.
How a place earns its tier, the evidence chips and the last-verified dates are explained in full in our methodology.
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