Who We Are
Palette Kitchen is currently operated by its founding team. We expect to update this policy with the name and address of the incorporated legal entity after Palette Kitchen forms as a California-based C-Corp. Until then, references to "Palette Kitchen," "we," "us," and "our" mean the Palette Kitchen founding team operating the app, website, waitlist, quiz, and related services.
You can contact us at hello@palette.kitchen.
Short version: Palette is a social, personalized cooking app. We use the data you provide to run the app, personalize recipes, power chat and cooking memory, support social features, process subscriptions, keep the service safe, and improve reliability. We do not sell personal information or share it for cross-context behavioral advertising.
Scope
This policy covers the Palette Kitchen iOS app, palette.kitchen, quiz.palette.kitchen, the waitlist and quiz, support emails, and any related online surfaces that link to this policy. It does not cover third-party websites, app stores, or services that have their own privacy policies.
Information We Collect
We collect information directly from you, from your device and app use, and from service providers that help operate Palette. Some information is optional, but certain features will not work without the data they need.
| Category | Examples | Primary use |
|---|---|---|
| Account and authentication | Apple Sign-In identifiers and tokens, backend user ID, refresh and access tokens, email address, name, username, profile details, access status, and marketing consent. | Create and secure your account, keep you signed in, recover your session, show your profile, and send important service messages. |
| Cooking preferences and personalization | Quiz answers, skill level, cuisines, flavor preferences, spice and taste choices, cooking goals, cooking-for information, pantry or required ingredients, allergens, dietary restrictions, nutrition goals, budget, time, equipment, and serving-size preferences. | Personalize recipes, support Taste Match, avoid known allergens or dietary conflicts, and make recipe guidance fit your kitchen. |
| Recipes, chat, and cooking memory | Recipe requests, prompts, chat messages, generated recipes, saved recipes, imported recipes, source URLs, cooking feedback, ratings, notes, recipe modifications, meal plans, cooking-mode activity, and learned preferences or constraints that Palette remembers. | Generate and modify recipes, maintain your cookbook, answer chat questions, remember useful cooking context, and improve future suggestions. |
| Imported recipe and social-link data | URLs you paste, recipe page HTML or structured recipe data, recipe text, public captions, thumbnails, transcripts, carousel images, and platform metadata where needed to extract a recipe. | Turn external recipes or supported social posts into clean recipe cards and cooking flows. |
| Social content and interactions | Dish photos, profile images, captions, comments, likes, follows, followers, story activity, public profile activity, blocks, reports, report reasons, and optional report descriptions. | Run the social feed, help people discover cooks and dishes, enforce community safety, and respond to abuse reports. |
| Photos, camera, microphone, and speech | Photos you choose or take, optional feedback screenshots, camera access, microphone audio during voice features, speech transcripts, and on-device voice settings. | Let you upload dish/profile images, share screenshots with support, and use hands-free cooking help. |
| Purchases and subscription status | Product IDs, entitlement status, subscription tier, expiration dates, trial status, purchase or restore events, quota usage, and related subscription diagnostics. We do not receive your full payment card number from Apple. | Provide free and Pro access, enforce feature limits, process restores, troubleshoot billing, and prevent entitlement drift. |
| Notifications and device information | APNs device token, notification preferences, notification interactions, device model, iOS version, app version, locale, time zone, screen information, text-size setting, low-power mode, thermal state, disk-space and memory signals, IP address, user agent, and request IDs. | Send push notifications you permit, diagnose issues, measure performance, secure the service, and support users. |
| Analytics, diagnostics, and logs | App launches, page or screen activity, feature interactions, API performance, crash data, performance data, MetricKit summaries, error breadcrumbs, backend logs, audit logs, and website analytics. Search analytics are limited to query length and result counts, not the search text itself. | Understand whether features work, improve reliability, investigate bugs, prevent abuse, and make product decisions. |
| Waitlist, quiz, and support | Name, email address, quiz answers, trait scores, quiz result, referral code, referrer attribution, waitlist position, referral counts, support messages, feedback category and content, optional screenshots, and support metadata. | Run the waitlist and referral system, send launch updates, respond to support, and create internal feedback issues. |
We do not intentionally collect precise location, contacts, HealthKit data, payment card numbers, government IDs, or biometric identifiers. Your IP address may reveal an approximate location when you use our app or website.
Sensitive Preferences
Some cooking preferences can be sensitive. For example, allergen exclusions, dietary restrictions, nutrition goals, religiously motivated diets, health-related eating preferences, and similar information may reveal sensitive details about you. You choose whether to provide this information. We use it to personalize Palette, respect guardrails, and improve cooking safety. We do not sell this information or use it for targeted advertising.
How We Use Information
We use the information we collect to:
- Operate, maintain, secure, and troubleshoot Palette.
- Create accounts, authenticate users, and prevent unauthorized access.
- Personalize recipes, Taste Match, chat responses, and cooking guidance.
- Generate, import, modify, save, and organize recipes and grocery lists.
- Provide social features such as posts, comments, likes, follows, blocks, reports, and story circles.
- Moderate images and user content for safety and community integrity.
- Run the waitlist, quiz, referral flow, launch updates, and support workflows.
- Process subscriptions, restore purchases, enforce quotas, and detect entitlement issues.
- Send push notifications, reminders, and transactional messages when enabled or required.
- Analyze usage, crashes, performance, and product health.
- Comply with law, enforce terms, protect rights, and respond to legal requests.
AI, Chat, and Chef Memory
Palette uses AI to generate recipes, extract recipes from links, parse ingredients, estimate nutrition, explain cooking terms, modify recipes, power chat, summarize conversations, detect intent, filter off-topic requests, and maintain cooking memory.
When you use these features, prompts, recipe content, imported content, chat messages, preference context, and model outputs may be sent to our backend, AI gateway, model providers, and AI observability tools. We use OpenRouter as a model gateway, which can route requests to model providers such as Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Qwen, Groq, and others, depending on the feature and reliability needs. We use Langfuse to trace AI requests, responses, latency, cost, and quality.
Chef Memory can remember likes, dislikes, habits, constraints, equipment, time limits, budget, serving sizes, and guidance style. You can review, add, correct, delete, pause, or reset remembered preferences in the app. Private-mode and pause controls are intended to reduce future learning, but already submitted chat messages and operational logs may still be retained according to this policy.
Device Permissions
The iOS app may request optional device permissions. You can manage these in iOS Settings.
- Camera: used to capture and share photos of dishes.
- Photo Library: used to pick profile pictures, dish photos, or feedback screenshots.
- Microphone: used for hands-free cooking and voice chat features.
- Speech Recognition: used to transcribe voice input. Where available, Palette prefers on-device recognition. Depending on device, language, iOS version, and Apple framework behavior, Apple speech services may process audio or transcription data.
- Notifications: used for social, recipe, subscription, and app updates if you allow them.
Local Storage
Palette stores some data on your device to make the app faster and work smoothly. This can include authentication tokens in the iOS Keychain, local SwiftData caches for profiles, recipes, conversations, saved recipes, imported recipes, taste data, and grocery lists, plus preferences in UserDefaults. Local data may remain on your device until you sign out, delete your account, clear app data through available app controls, or uninstall the app.
Cookies, Local Storage, and Similar Technologies
Our website, waitlist, and quiz may use browser local storage, session storage, cookies, URL parameters, and analytics scripts to remember quiz state, waitlist status, referral attribution, personality results, share links, page activity, and performance information. For example, referral codes can be stored briefly so a friend's signup can be attributed correctly, and quiz results may be stored locally so returning visitors can see their result again.
You can usually clear or block these technologies through your browser, but some quiz, waitlist, referral, sharing, or status features may not work correctly without them.
Automated Personalization and Decisions
Palette uses automated systems to personalize recipes, score taste matches, generate and rank suggestions, estimate nutrition, detect cooking terms, apply usage limits, moderate images or captions, detect off-topic chat requests, and recommend social or recipe content. These systems are intended to support cooking, safety, and product quality. They are not intended to make legal, credit, employment, housing, insurance, medical, or similarly significant decisions about you.
If an automated result looks wrong, unsafe, or unfair, contact us or use the available app controls to correct, delete, report, or reset the relevant content or preference.
When We Share Information
We share information only as needed to provide Palette, use service providers, comply with law, protect people, or complete actions you request.
| Recipient | What may be shared | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Other Palette users | Public profile information, posts, dish photos, captions, comments, likes, follows, and other social content you choose to share. | To run social discovery and sharing features. |
| Apple | Apple Sign-In data, App Store purchase data, APNs device tokens, speech-recognition interactions where applicable, and device permission flows. | Authentication, app distribution, purchases, push notifications, and Apple platform services. |
| RevenueCat | Backend user ID, purchase and subscription status, entitlements, product IDs, trials, and restore events. | Subscription management, entitlement sync, purchase restore, and billing support. |
| Cloud and infrastructure providers | Account data, recipes, user content, images, logs, request metadata, database records, files, queues, and cached operational data. | Hosting, storage, databases, image delivery, queues, security, backups, and service reliability. |
| AI and observability providers | Prompts, chat messages, recipe content, imported content, preference context, model outputs, request metadata, and quality or cost traces. | Recipe generation, chat, import, memory, model routing, debugging, quality review, and cost monitoring. |
| Analytics and diagnostics providers | User ID, device ID, usage events, product interactions, crash data, performance data, request IDs, breadcrumbs, and website analytics. | Product analytics, crash reporting, performance monitoring, and reliability debugging. |
| Moderation and safety providers | Images, moderation labels, report metadata, and safety-related content. | Image moderation, abuse prevention, reports, and community safety. |
| Recipe import and grocery partners | Supported social URLs, public captions or transcripts, recipe URLs, extracted recipe content, grocery-list titles, and grocery item names/amounts. | Recipe extraction and optional Instacart product-link generation. |
| Support and workflow tools | Support messages, feedback, user email, screenshots, app version, iOS version, device model, locale, time zone, and related diagnostics. | Customer support, bug tracking, and internal product workflows. |
| Legal, safety, or business recipients | Information reasonably necessary for a legal request, rights protection, fraud prevention, safety investigation, financing, merger, acquisition, or corporate restructuring. | Compliance, enforcement, protection, and business continuity. |
Providers may include Apple, RevenueCat, PostHog, Sentry, Vercel, self-hosted Umami analytics, AWS services including S3, CloudFront, Rekognition, queues and compute, PlanetScale/PostgreSQL, OpenRouter and its downstream model providers, Langfuse, Supadata, Instacart, Linear, and email or waitlist delivery providers.
No Sale or Advertising Tracking
We do not sell personal information. We do not share personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising. The current iOS app privacy manifest declares data as linked to the user where applicable, used for app functionality and analytics, and not used for tracking.
Retention
We keep personal information for as long as reasonably necessary for the purposes described in this policy, including to provide your account, operate social and recipe features, maintain subscriptions, comply with law, resolve disputes, enforce terms, protect security, and maintain backups.
- Account, profile, taste, cookbook, social, chat, and memory data are generally retained while your account is active.
- Public content may remain visible until you delete it or delete your account, subject to moderation, backups, and legal obligations.
- Support, feedback, reports, audit logs, security logs, subscription records, and abuse-prevention records may be retained longer when needed for safety, legal, tax, accounting, or operational reasons.
- Waitlist and quiz data may be kept until launch communications, referral tracking, and related operational needs are complete, or until you ask us to delete it.
- Backups and cached copies may take additional time to expire after deletion requests.
Your Choices
- You can update profile, taste, dietary, allergen, and memory information in the app where controls are available.
- You can review, correct, pause, delete, or reset Chef Memory information in the app where controls are available.
- You can delete posts, comments, recipes, conversations, or other content where app controls are available.
- You can manage camera, photo, microphone, speech, and notification permissions in iOS Settings.
- You can unsubscribe from marketing emails by using the unsubscribe mechanism where provided or by emailing us.
- You can request account deletion, access, correction, export, or other privacy help by emailing hello@palette.kitchen.
Regional Privacy Rights
Depending on where you live, you may have rights to know, access, correct, delete, export, restrict, or object to certain processing of your personal information. You may also have the right to withdraw consent where processing is based on consent, and the right not to be discriminated against for exercising privacy rights.
California
California residents may request to know the categories and specific pieces of personal information we collect, the categories of sources, the purposes of collection, the categories of recipients, correction, deletion, and information about sale or sharing. We do not sell personal information or share it for cross-context behavioral advertising. We use sensitive preference information only for the services you request and related safety, security, and legal purposes.
European Economic Area and United Kingdom
Our legal bases may include performing our contract with you, your consent, our legitimate interests in operating and improving Palette, compliance with legal obligations, and protecting users and the service. Where required, optional sensitive dietary, allergen, health-related, or religiously motivated preference information is processed with your consent or another applicable legal basis.
Canada
Canadian users may request access to or correction of personal information and may contact us with questions or complaints about our privacy practices.
To exercise rights, email hello@palette.kitchen. We may need to verify your identity before completing a request.
International Transfers
Palette is intended for users in the United States, Canada, Europe, and other regions. Your information may be processed in the United States and other countries where we or our providers operate. Those countries may have privacy laws that differ from the laws where you live.
Security
We use administrative, technical, and organizational safeguards designed to protect personal information. Examples include HTTPS in transit, token-based authentication, Keychain storage for iOS tokens, production secret management, access controls, provider-side security features, and logging and monitoring for abuse or reliability issues. No system is perfectly secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.
Children
Palette is not directed to children under 13. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you believe a child has provided personal information to Palette, contact us and we will take appropriate steps.
Changes
We may update this policy as Palette changes, as our provider list changes, or when our legal entity is formed. If changes are material, we will provide notice through the app, website, email, or another reasonable method.
Contact
Questions, requests, and complaints can be sent to hello@palette.kitchen.