Who maintains this, and how.

Flintmere runs a standing council of functional seats. Seat #39, Regulatory Affairs, owns the accuracy of everything published here and holds a veto on regulatory claims — including a veto on the scope statement at the foot of every page.

Flintmere is a commercial company: we sell catalog letters and a Shopify app. This standard is published free, under CC-BY 4.0, because a specification nobody can read or cite is worth nothing as a specification. We would rather it be used than owned.

Numbered releases publish half-yearly. Between releases, an automated monitor watches the regulator sources each field cites and flags changes for review.

We deliberately do not name the months. A published cadence we might miss would cost more credibility than the planning convenience is worth.

Nothing the monitor flags reaches a public page without review. Every published change-log entry carries both dates — when it was flagged, and when it was reviewed.

A pinned URL — /food/v1.0/ — is immutable once published. A correction does not edit it; a correction publishes v1.0.1 at its own URL and leaves the original in place.

Old versions stay live indefinitely, including after a major release supersedes them. A citation made today resolves to the same document years from now, which is the only property that makes a URL worth citing at all.

A continuous-integration check hashes the specification and fails the build if a published version changes without a paired change-log entry. The guarantee is enforced, not just promised.

Corrections and challenges are welcome now and are the fastest way to improve the document — particularly from anyone who works with these regulations directly.

We are not merging external changes before v1.1. One reviewer cannot sustain a merge cadence, and saying so is more honest than a contribution process that quietly stalls.