Who writes this
Know Food Safety is a small independent publisher, not a training provider and not a certifying body. Three named writers carry the byline on what is published here: Lena Ortiz on the food-safety lessons and concept pages, Marcus Reed on the research, and Naomi Brooks on the exam-preparation articles on the blog.
Naomi Brooks
Exam Preparation Writer
Naomi Brooks writes about exam preparation for Know Food Safety. Her experience draws on several years supporting staff induction and training materials for a regional hospitality business. This background shapes her practical approach to breaking complex requirements into manageable learning steps.
Her articles cover practice-question techniques, common exam mistakes, revision planning and test-day preparation. She explains how to identify what a question is testing, eliminate plausible but incorrect answers and recognize when similar food-safety rules apply in different situations.
Naomi focuses on understanding rather than memorizing isolated answers. Each article connects exam questions to the underlying food-safety principle, helping candidates apply what they have learned when the wording or scenario changes.
Lena Ortiz
Food Safety Concepts Writer
Lena Ortiz writes about practical food-safety concepts for Know Food Safety. Her experience is informed by five years in bakery operations for an international pastry business, where allergen separation, cleaning schedules, temperature checks and safe food handling formed part of the daily routine.
Her articles explain how food-safety rules apply to realistic situations, from receiving deliveries and checking temperatures to preventing cross-contamination and responding to employee illness.
Lena focuses on time and temperature control, personal hygiene, allergens, cleaning and sanitizing, safe storage and active managerial control. Rather than presenting the Food Code as a collection of numbers, she connects each requirement to the hazard it is intended to control.
Marcus Reed
Research and Standards Writer
Marcus Reed writes about research and food-safety standards for Know Food Safety. His experience draws on several years in research and content operations for an education publisher, where he worked with public guidance, changing requirements and evidence-led learning material.
His articles cover changes to the FDA Food Code, updates to certification material and original research into how candidates study and search for exam support.
Marcus separates what the available evidence shows from what it cannot establish. Research pieces include their methods, figures, sources and limitations so readers can examine the work for themselves.
He also tracks terminology and requirements that have changed between editions, helping prevent retired guidance, outdated pass marks and superseded language from appearing in current study material.
Dana Whitfield, Editor
Know Food Safety is edited by one person, writing under the name Dana Whitfield.
Dana Whitfield is the editor of Know Food Safety. Dana is a pen name for this site's editorial desk, not the byline on the lessons and concept pages: those carry the byline of the writer who prepared them. Dana remains the name the desk itself publishes under.
The work published under that name is editorial, not professional practice. The desk does not work in a commercial kitchen, does not hold a food-safety certification, and does not inspect restaurants. What the desk does is read the primary sources and make them teachable: every fact on this site is drawn from the FDA Food Code 2022 with its November 2024 Supplement, or from the ServSafe Manager Book, 9th Edition, and is cited to the specific code section or chapter it came from.
The whole corpus was then reviewed line by line against the 9th Edition, and the material that had gone stale was corrected. The retired ALERT food defense tool was replaced with Employees FIRST. Warewashing final rinse temperatures were corrected against Food Code 4-501.112. The ServSafe Manager pass mark was corrected to 70 percent, at least 56 of the 80 scored questions, against ServSafe's own published FAQ.
Those corrections are now enforced rather than remembered. Three automated checks run before anything is published, and a failure stops the build.
Dana Whitfield is the name the editorial desk itself publishes under. The lessons and concept pages carry the byline of the writer who prepared them, and Dana remains the desk’s own name for work that is not attributed to one of them.
What we do not claim
This matters more on food safety than it would on most subjects, so it is worth stating plainly rather than burying it.
- Dana Whitfield is a pen name for this site’s editorial desk. It is not a real person you could look up, and no claim of professional food-service experience, certification, license, or academic qualification is attached to it.
- This site’s guidance is compiled and cited from named primary sources, not drawn from any writer’s own workplace experience, and the citation gate enforces that before anything publishes. A writer’s background shapes how a topic is explained; it never supplies the requirement itself.
- It has not been reviewed by an external credentialed food-safety professional. If that changes, this page will say who did the review and when.
- Nothing here is a substitute for your employer’s food-safety program or the rules your local health department enforces. Where they differ from anything on this site, follow them, not us.
What this site is, and is not
Know Food Safety is exam preparation only. We cannot issue a certificate, a food handler card, or any credential of any kind, and we do not administer or proctor exams. Certification comes from ServSafe and from your local jurisdiction, never from us. We do not guarantee an exam result.
Know Food Safety is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the National Restaurant Association Educational Foundation. ServSafe is their registered trademark, and it is used here only to describe which exams this material prepares you for.
Our practice questions are original study material. They are written to reflect the skills and question formats the exams test, and they do not reproduce live or recalled ServSafe exam questions.
How the material is developed
Every fact on this site is drawn from one of two primary sources: the FDA Food Code 2022 and the November 2024 Supplement, and the ServSafe Manager Book, 9th Edition. Concept pages and answer pages carry a numbered source list, so you can see the exact Food Code section or book chapter a statement came from and check it yourself.
Every content page shows the date it was last reviewed, taken from the record itself rather than typed into the page, so a stale page cannot present itself as a fresh one. When the ServSafe curriculum or the Food Code changes, the corpus is re-checked against it and the affected pages are corrected and re-dated.
The aim is not to memorize isolated answers. Explanations connect each answer back to the food-safety principle, procedure, or code requirement it is testing.
The three checks that run before anything publishes
Editorial promises are easy to make and hard to keep across two hundred thousand words, so the ones that matter here are enforced by scripts rather than by memory. The first two run at the start of every production build, and a failure stops the build.
1. The edition checker
scripts/check-edition.mjs reads every markdown file in the content library against a manifest of what changed in the 9th Edition. It fails the build on any superseded term it finds, with the line number and the replacement: ALERT where it should now say Employees FIRST, hand sanitizer where the Food Code says hand antiseptic, or the old 60-of-80 Manager pass mark. It also counts the 9th Edition topics that must appear at least once, so a chapter cannot quietly go missing. The manifest is checked for being armed before the scan runs, so a truncated or emptied rule file fails loudly instead of passing everything.
2. The citation gate
scripts/check-citations.mjs reads every published concept hub, question page, practice question, and state page out of the database and refuses to publish any of them that has no citation attached, or that is not marked as 9th Edition. It then runs the same superseded-term rules over the stored prose of every published row, because a page can carry a perfectly good citation and still teach something the 9th Edition retired. If the credentials that let it read the database are configured but incomplete, it fails rather than skipping quietly.
3. The demand gate
scripts/verify-question-demand.mjs governs whether a standalone answer page is written at all. A question phrasing has to show real, measurable search demand of its own, at low competition, before it earns a page, and unusually high-volume phrasings are held back for a manual check that the people searching are exam candidates rather than the general public. The point is that this site has fewer pages than it could, not more.
Corrections
If you find something on this site that is wrong, out of date, or unclear, please tell us and we will fix it. Write to anthony@certcrush.app or use the contact page. Corrections to published material change the review date shown on the page.
Start preparing
Begin with the free ServSafe Food Handler track, look at ServSafe Manager preparation, or compare the two on the pricing page.