Contribute: Share Your Perspective

We appreciate your interest in our publication.

If you have a topic and would like to share with the rest of the industry, then please accept our invitation to have your article published in our magazine. You may send your article in MSWord format to our editorial department at editorial(at)pfionline.com. However, Please make sure that your work complies with our Editorial Guidelines.

We will try to respond within 7 working days of hearing from you. For time-sensitive articles only, please state “urgent” in the subject line.
We peer review all submitted content to be sure that it is contextual and conform to the scope of our magazine. For that purpose your content may go through the following stages before getting published:

  • Review of content
  • Review of language
  • Final review by the Editorial Board

General Guidelines for Articles

  • Please keep in mind that you are writing for a trade magazine. Most of our readers are involved in the industry and want to learn the important practical aspects of a given topic without going through too much background information.
  • The article should offer clear perspectives and new insights.
  • It is important to develop arguments and adduce evidence. Mere iteration of facts or bald assertions will not suffice.
  • It should be written on issues, events, and trends of industrial/trade significance.
  • Personal opinion is welcome, but it should not overwhelm the presentation of the context and the facts of the issue.
  • Be thrifty, make every word count and remember, less is more. Highly technical pieces are not required, what we need are useful, practical features of approximately 3000 words
  • Be clear. Watch out for long sentences. They are a sure way to lose readers. If a sentence is more than two lines long, restructure it. If you cannot shorten your sentences, your argument is probably not tight enough.
  • Avoid cliches. Metaphors lose their impact if they are too familiar. Be inventive.
  • Please remember that the content is read by an international audience.

Title and Article Summary

Your title should be ten words or less, it should include active words. It should also refer to the important issue or region or topic it covers. A punchy phrase is NOT enough, capture the context so that your article shows up in search results and Google News. Each article must begin with a one-sentence summary (the “lead”) that uses the active voice. Think of this as a trailer. Do not say, “an analysis” or “commentary”- tell us the salient finding from the analysis.

Examples of Good Titles

  • Mobile Technology: Shaping the Food Industry
  • Small Cities, Big Opportunity: Food-retail Boon in rural India
  • Innovative Warehousing: Reducing Post-harvest Looses
  • 10 Mistakes to avoid in food marketing
  • Rural Youth: Key to a food secure future
  • Organic Farming: The Way Out
  • What’s Trending in Urban India: questions to ask?

Grammar and Punctuation

  • While a few well-known abbreviations are acceptable, please try to avoid them
  • The tables and figures should be cited by number.
  • References should be numbered consecutively by their order of appearance in the text. Example: Rajat K Baiysa (2010). “Changing face of Indian Food Industry: An overview”. Processed Food Industry. 14 (1) 12-15

Contributor Agreement

You agree to:

  • Be available to our editors to answer any question; request for clarification; request for sources or fact checks about your articles. We will try our best to do this promptly
  • Abide by the editors’ decisions. We may amend headlines and create subheadings so that the article is compliant with PFI style

We request that:

Your article should preferably not have been published before.

Please also note that we get more articles than we can publish, so please be patient. By contributing an article you cede to us the right to edit it, have the final say on edits, and in some cases, not to publish the piece.

Rights to your work

All articles, multimedia content, and other materials, creations, works of authorship and inventions submitted by you will be your sole property, but you grant us a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide right and license to use, copy, reproduce, adapt, publish and distribute the content in any form.

Anonymous publication

If you are at risk for expressing certain views under your real name, please click here to write to us. Please state that you wish to write under a pseudonym or an alias and provide an explanation of your particular personal situation. Your information will not be disclosed to a third party without your prior consent unless we are legally required to do so.

Multimedia

This includes content in all forms such as photo features, infographics, videos, and audio. The key here is to make a point and point it well.

Guidelines for Photo Features

  • Use a catchy title and tell a compelling story.
  • Ideally, use 10-15 photos to tell your point. This is the optimal length for the internet
  • Draft a one or two-line description to place each photo in context.
  • Click here to send us photos via email or upload them to Dropbox and share the link with us by clicking here.
  • If you do not use Dropbox but would like to, then contact us to receive instructions on how to do so.
  • Photos should be over 938(w) x 450(h) and under 2mb in size. The file type contact should be jpg or png.

Guidelines for Videos

  • Make sure the sound is good so that you can be heard.
  • Decent lighting is desirable so that people can see you.
  • Describe topic – tell people what you will be talking about.
  • Explain why your topic is important
  • Express your perspective – be succinct, lucid, and logical.
  • Summarize your perspective in a paragraph.
  • Do all of this in a minute if you can and, in any case, do not exceed three minutes.
  • Upload your video here, where you will find further instructions.

Guidelines for Audio

  • Make sure the sound is good so that you can be heard.
  • Describe topic – tell people what you will be talking about.
  • Explain why your topic is important.
  • Express your perspective – be succinct, lucid, and logical
  • Summarize your audio discussion in a paragraph.
  • Send us your audio file by clicking here.