Privacy Policy

Our Meal Planner (“we”, “us”) is a meal-planning app operated from New Zealand. This policy explains what personal information we collect, why we collect it, how we look after it, and the choices you have. We handle personal information in accordance with the New Zealand Privacy Act 2020.

The short version: we collect only what the app needs to work, we don't run ads, we never sell your information to anyone, and we don't use any outside tracking or analytics service. We do keep a private record of which screens and features are used - see “How the app is used” below - but it stays in our own database, is never shared with anyone, and never records what you actually typed.

What we collect

• Account details - your name, email address, and password. Passwords are stored only in securely hashed form; we can never see them.
• Things you add to the app - recipes, ingredients, meal plans, shopping lists, pantry staples, favourite takeaways, notes, and any feedback you send us.
• Food log (optional) - if you use the Food log, we store what you record as eaten (meals, saved meals, portions, the days you ate them, and the particular products you matched each ingredient to), plus the daily totals the app works out from them. Your food log is private to you - it is not shared with your group or household.
• Voice entry (optional) - the Food log has a microphone button that lets you speak instead of type. It uses your browser's own dictation feature. In most browsers (including Chrome and Safari) that means the browser sends your recording to its maker's speech service - Google or Apple - to turn it into text, under their privacy policy, not ours. We never receive or store the audio: all we get back is the text, which is then treated like anything else you type into the Food log. The microphone only listens between the moment you tap it on and the moment you tap it off (or it stops by itself after a pause), and your browser will ask your permission the first time. If you would rather not use it at all, simply type instead.
• Nutrition settings (optional) - if you set up daily nutrition targets, we store the details you choose to enter (sex, age range, activity level, and any custom targets) so the app can show guideline amounts. Like your food log, these details are private to you - other people in your group cannot see them. You can leave these blank, change them, or clear them at any time in Settings. The app's nutrition figures are estimates for general information, not medical or dietetic advice.
• Group information - which group(s) you belong to and who you have linked with, so shared cookbooks and meal plans work.
• Settings and technical data - your timezone and notification preferences, and (only if you turn on weekly reminders) a push-notification subscription for your device.
• Messages you send us - if you use the contact form, we store the name, email address and message you enter so we can reply. These messages are not linked to any account, so they aren't included in an account export or deletion - ask us and we'll remove them.
• Security records - to stop repeated sign-in, password-reset, sign-up and contact-form attempts, we keep a short counter against the email address or the internet (IP) address the attempt came from. It is used only to slow down abuse.
• Sign-in cookies - a cookie that keeps you signed in. This is the only cookie we use. We do not use advertising, analytics, or tracking cookies.
• How the app is used - we keep a private record of which screens you open and a short list of key actions (for example: added a recipe, added a meal to a plan, marked a meal cooked, logged a meal). Each entry is just the name of the action, the screen it happened on, and when - never what you typed, searched, saved, or planned. It is not sent to any outside analytics company, it does not use a tracking cookie, and only we can see it, to understand which parts of the app are actually useful and where people get stuck.

How we use it

• To run the service: storing your recipes, building meal plans and shopping lists.
• To share your recipes, plans, and lists with the people in your group - that's the point of the app.
• To send the weekly planning reminder, if you switch it on (you can switch it off any time).
• To respond when you send us feedback.
• To keep the service secure - for example, limiting repeated sign-in attempts.
• To understand which parts of the app get used and which don't, from the private usage record described above, so we know what to improve.

We do not use your information for advertising, profiling, or marketing, and we do not sell it.

Who can see your information

• Your group - recipes you add are visible to everyone in your group. Meal plans, shopping lists, and favourites are visible to household members you have chosen to link with.
• Anyone you send a share link to - if you use “Share” on a recipe, the app creates a public web link. Anyone who has that link can open the recipe without signing in, and see the recipe and the name shown on your profile. The link stays live until you remove it or delete your account. Nothing else - not your food log, your meal plan, or your other recipes - is reachable from it.
• Service providers - we use trusted providers to run the app: Supabase (our database, hosted in Japan), Vercel (web hosting), and Sentry (error monitoring, hosted in the European Union). If something breaks in the app, Sentry receives a technical report about the error so we can fix it - we have configured it not to collect your name, email, or the content of what you typed, and any screen recordings it captures are fully masked. If you enable weekly reminders, the notification is delivered through your device's push service (operated by Apple, Google, or Mozilla depending on your device).
• Password safety checks - when you choose a password, we check it against known data breaches using the Have I Been Pwned service. Only a small fragment of a scrambled version of the password is sent; your actual password never leaves our servers.
• Luma health journal (optional) - if you choose to connect the Luma integration in Settings, your planned meals and their ingredients are sent to that service using a token you provide. This only happens if you connect it, and you can disconnect at any time in Settings.
• When the law requires it - we may disclose information if we are legally required to.

Where your information is stored

Your information is stored on secure cloud servers located outside New Zealand - primarily in Japan (Supabase) - and processed by our hosting provider (Vercel), which operates infrastructure internationally. Technical error reports are processed by Sentry in the European Union. We only use providers that apply security safeguards comparable to those required under New Zealand law.

How we protect it

• All connections to the app are encrypted (HTTPS).
• Every account is protected by authentication, and database-level rules ensure one group's data can never be read by another.
• Passwords are hashed, never stored in plain text, and checked against known breaches.
• We carry out periodic security reviews of the app.

How long we keep it

We keep your information while your account is active. If you delete your account (Settings → Delete my account), your sign-in details, personal settings, notification subscriptions, saved favourites, feedback, your whole food log (including saved meals, repeats and daily totals), your nutrition settings, your usage record, and any share links you created are deleted - the share links stop working immediately. Recipes and meal plans you contributed to a shared group remain available to the rest of that group - they belong to the group's shared cookbook - but they are no longer linked to your name. If you are the only member of a group, the whole group and everything in it is deleted.

Two things sit outside that, because they are not attached to your account: messages you send through the contact form (ask us and we'll delete them), and the short security counters described above, which we keep only while they are useful for blocking abuse.

Your rights

Under the Privacy Act 2020 you have the right to:

• Access the personal information we hold about you - you can download a copy any time from Settings → Export my data, or contact us for anything not covered there.
• Correct your information - most of it you can edit directly in the app.
• Delete your account and personal information (Settings → Delete my account).

If you have a privacy concern, please contact us first and we'll do our best to resolve it. If you're not satisfied with our response, you can complain to the New Zealand Office of the Privacy Commissioner (privacy.org.nz).

Children

The app is intended for people aged 16 and over. Younger family members may use it as part of a family group with a parent or guardian's involvement.

Changes to this policy

If we make meaningful changes to this policy - for example, if the app introduces paid plans or new integrations - we'll update this page and change the date at the top. If a change significantly affects how your information is handled, we'll let you know in the app.

Nutrition data sources

The app's nutrition figures are estimates built from public food-composition data: values derived from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's FoodData Central (public domain) and product data from Open Food Facts, which is made available under the Open Database License (ODbL). These figures are for general information only, not medical or dietetic advice.

Contact

Questions about privacy? Use our contact form or Feedback & feature requests in the app's Settings.