FoodLore — Privacy Policy

Last updated: 19 October 2026

FoodLore is a community kitchen archive. This page says, in plain words, what happens to your recipes, your photos and your account. It describes the app as it ships today.

What stays on your phone

Without an account, everything stays on the phone: the recipes, the stories, the ingredients and steps, which ingredients and steps you have checked off, the shopping list, and the photo files themselves. FoodLore does not send your archive anywhere in that mode.

With a free account, the phone copy still works exactly as before, and for your recipes and photos it is your only copy, because cloud backup only happens with Premium and signing out never deletes anything. With Premium (cloud backup on), the phone copy stays in sync with the cloud.

What FoodLore stores for you in the cloud

If you sign in, FoodLore stores a small amount of your data with our hosting providers: your profile, always, and your archive as well once you have Premium and turn cloud backup on. Signing in does not turn cloud backup on by itself. Supabase stores account and recipe records. Private profile and recipe photos are stored in Google Cloud Storage in northern Europe and served through FoodLore's access-controlled media service.

• Your sign-in. The email address you used (or the account identifier Google or Apple gives us when you sign in with them), any name supplied during sign-up or by that provider, and your FoodLore user id.
• Your profile. Your handle, and any display name, profile photo, bio and website you add. Your handle is created for you the first time you sign in, and you can change it. Your profile photo is kept in our hosting provider's storage. Your editable profile fields and saved photo path are visible only to you while reviewed community profiles are being prepared. Other signed-in cooks can check handle availability without reading your profile. Only you can request a new temporary photo link. Your profile is free: you can set it all up, photo included, without Premium.
• Your archive. The words of your recipes and the photo files, copied to cloud storage that only your account can read. Access rules on the server enforce that: no other user can open your recipes or photos unless you invite them through relatives sharing, which is read only for them: they can never copy a recipe into their own archive, and they can never change yours. A relative can leave the shared shelf at any time; leaving removes their access and deletes nothing of yours.
• Your collections. If you have Premium, you can sort recipes into named collections, and use sub-collections. The collections themselves, and which recipes are filed in each one, are stored with our hosting provider. Collection writes are Premium. Reading is not: if your subscription lapses, you keep reading the collections you already made, and nothing is deleted.
• Your scan count. How many free scan credits and upload attempts your account has used, so the quota and Premium are counted correctly.
• Purchase records. The status and expiry of your subscription, and the RevenueCat customer id it belongs to.

Scanning a handwritten recipe

When you scan, the app makes a smaller copy of the photo on your phone and sends it to our scan service. That service passes the image to Google's Gemini model, whose only job is to read the handwriting and return text. The text comes back to the app for you to review before you save the recipe.

FoodLore does not keep the scan image: it is used to read the card and is not saved to your archive or to the scan service by itself. Every account includes three free scan credits, with up to three upload attempts per credit across its lifetime. Free accounts may submit up to 3 accepted uploads per rolling hour; Premium accounts may submit up to 30 accepted uploads per rolling hour and have unlimited scan credits. The hourly allowance does not restore free credits or attempts. Google processes the image under its Gemini API terms. Google's processing has separate retention rules, including limited safety and abuse-monitoring logs; FoodLore's transient handling does not mean that Google retains nothing.

Purchases and subscriptions

Payment for Premium is handled by Apple's App Store or Google Play; we never see your card number. RevenueCat receives an app-specific user id and the purchase and entitlement events, which is how FoodLore knows whether Premium is active. Premium covers four things: cloud backup and sync, relatives sharing, collections, and unlimited scans. The free tier keeps the on-device archive, every local feature and three free scan credits per account. You can read the current price, billing period, renewal and cancellation terms in the app before you subscribe, and in our Terms of Use.

Service providers

FoodLore uses a small number of providers, each of which receives only what it needs to do its job: Supabase (database, sign-in and the scan service), Google (private photo storage in Google Cloud Storage and the media service; the Gemini model for scanning; and Google sign-in when you choose it), Apple (Apple sign-in when you choose it), and RevenueCat (subscription state). Our providers keep standard server logs — timestamps and request metadata — for security and debugging, as any online service does.

What FoodLore does not do

• We do not sell, rent or trade your personal data.
• We show no advertising and use no third-party advertising or tracking SDKs.
• Your archive is never public: no public feed, no public links, and no comments. It is shown to another user only when you invite them through relatives sharing, and then only as read-only. Your profile is separate: its editable fields are visible only to you while reviewed community profiles are being prepared. Handle availability can be checked without reading a profile. Only you can request a new photo link; older links may work until they expire.
• Nothing is published today, and nothing publishes itself. If a future version offers a way to make a recipe publicly searchable, it will be an explicit choice you make for that one recipe, and never something that happens because your subscription started, lapsed or went inactive.
• We do not use your recipes, photos or scans to train machine-learning models.

Future community features

The community feed is not active in the current version. FoodLore does not currently collect feed posts, comments, reports, blocks or moderation records, and it does not claim to monitor community content or screen it automatically. Before a feed launches, this policy will be reviewed again. For that future feature, reports would preserve the reported text, a necessary copy of a reported profile photo in restricted Google Cloud storage in northern Europe, and a restricted case record for 90 days after dismissal or 12 months after a confirmed decision. An administrator can extend a confirmed case by 30 or 90 days with a recorded reason, or place it on an exceptional hold with a review date no more than 90 days away. The admin portal flags overdue holds; a hold remains in place until an administrator releases it. These records can still contain personal information after the reported account is deleted; live account links and copied handles are removed. Only authorised moderators with an authenticator-verified session can read case evidence. A necessary preserved profile photo can remain after replacement or account deletion until the case expiry or documented hold ends. Recipe photos from private archives are not copied as report evidence. This community collection is not active today; notices will be reviewed before launch. Reports and moderation questions can be sent to legal@foodlorefamily.com; the in-app report and block tools described in the Terms will be available only when that community feature launches.

Keeping it, deleting it

We keep your recipes for you, not for a subscription. If Premium lapses, or you stop using FoodLore for a while, the recipes you own stay stored and stay readable by you. FoodLore does not delete your recipes because a subscription ended or an account went inactive.

You are in control of deleting what you own. You can delete any recipe you own inside the app at any time; that removes it from your phone and, if it has a cloud backup copy, from there too — whether or not Premium is still active. Deleting your account removes the account and everything stored for it from the active account: your recipes, the photos in your cloud backup, your profile and its photo, your collections, your scan count, your subscription record, your sign-in, and any relatives-sharing invitations and membership records. Photo files are removed from cloud storage by a background clean-up that retries until removal is confirmed, so a photo can remain briefly after you delete it. If you used a future community feature, a narrowly restricted moderation report or case may remain for the periods described above, including any documented extension or hold. You can choose to keep a copy on the phone when you delete the account.

You can delete your account inside the app at any time (Account → Delete account). If you no longer have the app installed, use our account deletion page or write to legal@foodlorefamily.com. Deleting your account does not cancel a subscription bought through the app store — cancel that in the store's subscription settings.

You can also ask us what we hold: which recipes and what personal data are stored for your account. Write to legal@foodlorefamily.com and we will answer.

Removal is bounded, and we will not overstate it. When you delete a recipe, we remove that entry, and because FoodLore has no copy mechanism we can account for what it held, so no in-app copy of the recipe remains anywhere. If a recipe is ever made public in a future version, we could remove the original entry, but we could not stop someone else from recreating it or writing their own version from what they saw. We say that plainly rather than promise a deletion we cannot deliver.

Age eligibility

FoodLore is intended for adults, and accounts are only for people aged 18 and over. We do not knowingly allow accounts for people under 18. If you believe an account belongs to someone under 18, write to us using the contact details below. We will review it, close an ineligible account and handle its data under the deletion and retention rules explained above.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it. If the change is significant, we will make that clear in the app or by email before it takes effect.

Contact

Questions about your data, or a deletion request: write to legal@foodlorefamily.com.