Food For Foodies, LLC, a Maryland limited liability company doing business as Food4Foodies ("F4F", "we", "us", or "our"), operates a marketplace, through our mobile apps, website, and related services (the "Service"), that connects independent home chefs ("Chefs") with people who want home-cooked and traditional food ("Foodies"). This Privacy Policy explains what personal information we collect, how we use and share it, how long we keep it, and the choices and rights you have. It applies to Chefs, Foodies, and Event Organizers, and to visitors to our website. It is part of our Terms of Service. For the personal information described here, F4F is the controller or "business" responsible for it.
Where the law requires a legal basis for processing, we rely on performing our contract with you, our legitimate interests (such as security, fraud prevention, and improving the Service), your consent (such as for location or push notifications), and compliance with legal obligations.
We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it with third parties for their own advertising.
Text messages. No mobile information will be shared with third parties or affiliates for marketing or promotional purposes. Your phone number and your consent to receive texts are used only to send the texts you chose: one-time verification codes you ask for and, if you turn them on, order texts; and, when you are talking to F4F support and want to confirm it's you, a one-time code you read back to the agent (the agent never sees your number). Order texts are off unless you turn them on. Message frequency varies with your orders, and message and data rates may apply. Reply STOP to stop and HELP for help, or turn them off in the app at any time; consent is not a condition of any purchase (see Order Texts).
We use the following categories of providers, each given only the information needed for its function:
Identity verification is optional for ordinary use, and required to offer or book a Chef@Home visit. When you verify, your government ID image and selfie are collected and processed directly by Stripe Identity through Stripe's own hosted flow, under Stripe's terms and privacy policy. F4F does not receive, view, or store your ID, selfie, or biometric data. We receive and store only the outcome (verified, pending, or not verified), which is used to show a badge and to unlock features.
All payments and payouts are processed by Stripe. Your card details go directly to Stripe; F4F stores only a reference token, never the full card number, expiration date, or security code. If you pay by bank account (for a Tiffin pack or an event fee), you connect it through Stripe, by signing in to your bank through Stripe or entering your account and routing numbers; Stripe handles those details under its own terms and privacy policy, and F4F receives only the payment's status. Chefs and Organizers who receive payouts provide the required identity and bank information directly to Stripe. We keep records of transactions, commissions, and refunds as needed for accounting, tax, and dispute purposes. A Chef or Organizer sees what they sold, F4F's commission and their payout, not the fees, delivery charges, tips or sales tax a buyer paid. Within F4F, the full payment details of an order are available only to staff in accounting and order management.
To arrange a delivery we request a courier quote and dispatch using the pickup address, delivery address, recipient name and phone number, order number, and delivery instructions. The courier network uses this information to complete and track the delivery and may keep it under its own privacy policy. We receive delivery status updates and the courier's approximate location while a delivery is in progress so we can show tracking to the Foodie and Chef.
Event details you publish as an Organizer are public. When a Chef requests to join, the Organizer sees the Chef's name, rating, and request. When an Organizer invites a Chef by phone number or email address, we use that contact information only to match the invitation to a Chef account and to deliver the invitation in the app; it may be held until a matching account exists and is not used to send unsolicited messages. We do not tell the Organizer whether a given phone number or email address belongs to a registered account: the Organizer sees only the contact they entered until the Chef accepts the invitation, and never learns who declined. Account identifiers are not exposed in event pages or their public data.
Messages and attached photos in order, complaint, and event conversations are stored on F4F's systems and are visible to the participants in that conversation. We do not send them to Stripe or other third parties except as described in this Policy. We may review them to resolve a complaint or dispute, investigate a report, enforce our Terms, provide support, prevent fraud and abuse, or comply with law. Evidence photos may be stored with restricted, expiring access links.
Messages you send to F4F support (Section 5) are kept in F4F's own systems (and, when we use it, in our support helpdesk, Help Scout), together with our replies, so we can follow up on your request. The app shows you the status of the requests you have sent and notifies you when we reply.
Some features, such as AI search, menu and listing import, bundle suggestions, dietary-label checks, nutrition estimates, and connected AI assistants (AI4Foodies), send content you provide (for example, what you type in AI search, menu text, listing details, or photos) to our AI provider, Anthropic, to generate a result. We share only what is needed for the request. Anthropic processes it on our behalf to generate the result and, under our agreement with it, does not use it to train its models. AI results can be inaccurate and are advisory only. If you connect a third-party AI assistant to your account, that assistant's own privacy practices apply to what you share with it.
Connected AI assistants (AI4Foodies). When you connect an AI assistant, we send it the information it needs to do what you ask, such as listings, menus, prices, your orders and their status. It sees your email address and phone number only partly hidden, and other people's street addresses only as an area. It never receives your payment details or a sign-in for the app. What the assistant does with what you share with it, and with what we send it, is governed by its provider's privacy policy. We record which assistant made each request, so that you can review and disconnect it.
With your permission, we use your device's location (in the app, or your browser's on our website's events page), or an address or ZIP code you enter, to show nearby Chefs, services, and events, to check delivery and Chef@Home travel radius, and to provide delivery tracking. A Chef's kitchen locations are used to decide which Foodies can discover their listings, and each listing is shown at the Chef's kitchen nearest the Foodie. With Truck4Foodies, when a food truck Chef taps "Open now", the phone's current location becomes that day's stop and is shown to Foodies as the truck's address until it closes; stops are shown only while the Chef sells as a food truck. When a food truck opens at a stop, Foodies who favorited that Chef's dishes and whose saved address is within about 10 km of the stop may get a notification; the Chef never sees who was notified. You can turn location permission off at any time in your device settings; some features will then work less well.
We keep personal information for as long as your account is active and as needed to provide the Service. If you delete your account, it is deactivated immediately and enters a 30-day grace period in which it can be recovered by contacting us; after that, the account and its associated personal data are permanently deleted. We may retain some information after deletion where needed to comply with legal, tax, and accounting obligations, resolve disputes, prevent fraud, and enforce our Terms. This includes transaction and refund records, and messages and complaint evidence that form part of another user's order record, which may be retained in a form that no longer identifies you directly where the law allows. Diagnostic logs are kept for a limited period. Our own application logs record only a shortened form of your IP address (the network a request came from, not your device's own address); our hosting provider's request logs may hold the full address for a limited period. An account disabled for violating our Terms may be retained and reviewed. To spot fake accounts, when this check is switched on and you sign up with an email address or Facebook, we keep a one-way fingerprint of the network address you signed up from (never the address itself), and we count failed payments; both are deleted after 30 days. If they look unusual, we may ask you to verify a phone number.
To exercise a right, contact privacy@food4foodies.com. We may need to verify your identity first, and we will respond within the time required by law. You will not be discriminated against for exercising your rights. If you are in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, or Switzerland, you also have the right to lodge a complaint with your local data-protection authority.
Residents of California and certain other U.S. states have rights to know, access, correct, delete, and obtain a copy of their personal information, and to opt out of the sale or sharing of personal information and of targeted advertising. In the past 12 months we have collected the categories of personal information described in Section 2 (identifiers, commercial information, internet and device activity, geolocation, and professional or content information, plus limited sensitive information such as precise location and account credentials) for the purposes in Section 3, and disclosed them to the categories of recipients in Sections 4 and 5. We do not sell personal information or share it for cross-context behavioral advertising, and we do not knowingly sell or share the information of people under 18. You may use an authorized agent to make a request, and you may appeal a decision by replying to our response. Because we do not sell or share personal information for advertising, opt-out preference signals such as Global Privacy Control do not change how we handle your information.
We use administrative, technical, and physical safeguards appropriate to the sensitivity of the information, including encrypted connections (HTTPS) between the app and our servers; passwords, sign-in codes and access keys kept only in a one-way hashed form; card and bank details held by our payment processor rather than by us; restricted and expiring access to private photos; rate limiting and abuse protection; email addresses and phone numbers masked in error reports; last names, email addresses, phone numbers, street addresses, dates of birth, delivery addresses, Chef@Home booking names and visit addresses, special requests, messages, complaints, invitation contacts and Apple sign-in tokens encrypted in our database under a key for each account, which is destroyed at the end of a deleted account's 30-day grace period, after which that information can no longer be read (a backup made before then can, until it expires), when the photos in your messages and complaints, your support screenshots and your profile picture are deleted too; a second sign-in factor for every F4F staff member; and access controls that limit who inside F4F can view account data. Staff see your email address, phone number, street address and date of birth hidden by default; showing one takes a role that needs it, a recorded reason and a fresh sign-in code, lasts 15 minutes, and is logged, as is every staff view of an account, order or complaint. No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, so we cannot guarantee absolute security. If we become aware of a breach affecting your information, we will notify you and regulators as the law requires.
We and our service providers may process and store information in the United States and other countries where data protection laws may differ from those where you live. Where the law requires, we use appropriate safeguards, such as standard contractual clauses, for transfers of personal information out of your country.
Our website uses only minimal, functional storage needed for it to work, and does not use third-party advertising trackers. Our mobile apps do not use cookies; they may use standard diagnostics and crash-reporting tools to keep the Service reliable. Our website's event listings load public event data from our servers.
Our Chef web app at chef.food4foodies.com keeps you signed in with two strictly necessary cookies set by our servers: one lasts an hour, the other keeps you signed in for up to 30 days unless you log out. Scripts on the page cannot read them, they are sent only to Food4Foodies, and they are not used for advertising or tracking. The sign-in page loads Google's, Apple's and Facebook's sign-in buttons, and if you choose to sign in with one of them, that company's sign-in window opens and its own privacy policy applies. We ask Facebook only for your public profile.
The Service is not directed to, and may not be used by, anyone under 18. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children. If you believe a child has given us personal information, contact us and we will delete it.
We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. If we make material changes, we will notify you in the app or by other reasonable means before the change takes effect. The "last updated" date at the top of this page shows the most recent revision.
Questions or requests about this Privacy Policy or your information? Email privacy@food4foodies.com. For general support, contact hello@food4foodies.com.
