About the Paleo Foundation

The Paleo Foundation was established on January 1, 2010, by Karen Pendergrass and her mother, Kimberly Eyer, in Los Angeles, California. It began before “Paleo” was even a measurable term on Google Trends — at a time when there were no standards, no certification marks, and no way for consumers to know whether a product labeled “Paleo” actually met any verifiable criteria.

Karen’s path to founding the organization was personal. After experiencing severe health complications that conventional approaches failed to resolve, she discovered ancestral nutrition through research rooted in S. Boyd Eaton’s landmark 1985 paper on Paleolithic nutrition. The dietary changes were transformative — but the lack of trustworthy product labeling in the market was a constant problem. Products claiming to be “Paleo” often contained grains, legumes, dairy, or artificial additives that directly contradicted the diet’s core principles.

That gap between marketing claims and actual compliance became the mission: develop rigorous, research-backed standards and give consumers, retailers, and manufacturers a reliable way to identify genuinely compliant products.

Since 2010, the Paleo Foundation has certified hundreds of brands whose products are carried in major retailers including Whole Foods Market, Walmart, Costco, Sprouts Farmers Market, and Thrive Market. Certified brands range from early-stage startups to publicly traded companies such as General Mills. Certification requests doubled annually through the mid-2010s as the Paleo and Keto markets expanded.

The Foundation’s standards development process draws on peer-reviewed nutritional research, regulatory frameworks, and input from an internal standards team with backgrounds in research, nutrition science, and food compliance. Standards are published openly and updated periodically as new research emerges.

The Foundation’s work has been covered by Men’s Health, Vice, Refinery29, Health magazine, New Hope Network, Food Navigator USA, and Food Business News, among others. The organization has a Wikipedia page and is listed on Crunchbase.

Every Paleo Foundation certification program is built on published standards that define exactly which ingredients, processing methods, and formulation criteria are permitted or prohibited. These standards are developed by the Foundation’s internal Standards Team and are informed by peer-reviewed nutritional science, toxicological research, archaeological evidence, and regulatory frameworks including FDA, EU, and Codex Alimentarius guidelines where applicable.

The Foundation publishes its certification standards and research openly. The Certified Paleo Standards, for example, reference foundational research on ancestral nutrition, diet tolerability, and the exclusion of grains, legumes, dairy, and artificial additives. The HMTc standards define category-specific maximum permissible levels for lead, arsenic, mercury, cadmium, chromium, nickel, tin, and aluminum based on toxicological evidence.

Beyond certification, the Foundation’s research team contributes to emerging work in microbiome science through the Microbiome Signatures Database and original research in microbial metallomics — investigating how trace metal exposure interacts with gut microbial communities in the context of chronic disease.