IngredientsMatter Privacy Notice

Who we are

IngredientsMatter is a meal-planning and ingredient-intelligence service that helps households manage pantry items, dietary profiles, product reviews, and weekly meal plans.

Privacy contact: use the secure contact form.

What this notice covers

This notice explains what personal data we collect, why we use it, how long we keep it, who we may share it with, and what rights are available to people who use the service.

The personal data we collect

• Account and household data such as username, display name, membership role, and invitation status.
• When you create an account yourself: what you type on the sign-up form, kept only until you use the link we email to check the address (the password only as a one-way hash). Our own server checks that the address's domain exists before the link is sent; nothing about the address is sent anywhere else for that. A sign-up whose link is not used is deleted after 24 hours, and nothing else is created until the link is used.
• Pantry, recipe, meal-plan, shopping, and product-scan data entered while using the service.
• Dietary and profile data such as ingredient avoid lists, allergy flags, and household meal preferences, and, only where the household chooses to record them, a person's relationship to the household and their birth month (year and month, never a full date of birth) so that age-based guidance can apply. A household may switch nutrition figures (calories and macronutrients) off for everyone, and any profile may ask for the same; that choice is a display preference only and is never used for anything else.
• Technical and security data such as session events, rate-limit data, audit events, cookie preferences, and error telemetry where enabled.

Why we use personal data

• To create and secure accounts.
• To manage households and invitations.
• To deliver pantry, planning, recipe, and ingredient-review features.
• To protect the service, investigate abuse, and respond to support or legal requests.
• To improve the service where optional analytics or testing has been chosen.

Lawful bases

• Contract, where processing is needed to provide the service requested by the user.
• Explicit consent (UK GDPR Article 9(2)(a)), for the health information a household records about its members: see "Health information and your consent" below.
• Legitimate interests, where processing is needed to secure, operate, and improve the service responsibly.
• Consent, where optional cookies, analytics, or similar non-essential features are used.
• Legal obligation, where retention or disclosure is required by law.

Health information and your consent

A person's allergies, intolerances, medical diets and foods to avoid are health information, a special category of personal data under UK GDPR. We hold and use it only with explicit consent (UK GDPR Article 9(2)(a)). The adult who records it gives that consent once for each person, by ticking the consent box when the information is first saved, in Dietary Settings or during setup. The tick confirms that they may record that person's health information and agrees to its use to check foods and plan meals for the household. It is used for nothing else. We record the consent: the version of this notice, when it was given and by which account. We treat this information conservatively, minimise access to it, and keep it separate from optional analytics or marketing.

The household's owner or any adult in it can withdraw that consent at any time, from the person's card in Dietary Settings ("Withdraw consent", then confirm). When they do:

• the person's allergies, intolerances, medical diets and foods to avoid are removed at once, and their meals are no longer checked against anything;
• every meal plan that includes them is checked again without their rules, and no verdict made for them is kept in it;
• any household data export waiting to be downloaded is withdrawn and its file deleted (a new one can be requested straight away);
• if nobody in the household then has health information recorded, the household's meal plans and favourites are cleared and the planner starts again from the pantry. The pantry, recipes and shopping lists stay.

The person's name, relationship, birth month and food likes and dislikes stay, with a record of when the consent was withdrawn and by which account. Recording their health information again needs a new consent. Withdrawing does not affect what was done before it, and the removed information stays in a backup only until that backup expires (see Retention).

Children and household profiles

Child profiles should only be created and managed by an adult account holder or household admin. We do not use child profile data for advertising or behavioural profiling.

Sharing personal data

We may use hosting, deployment, support, security, and similar processors to run the service. Where processors are used, we expect contracts and due diligence to be in place.

Retention

We keep personal data only for as long as necessary for the purposes described here. In summary:

• Your account, your household and its dietary profiles: while the account is in use. They are erased when a deletion request is approved and carried out.
• Pantry items: deleted once an item has not changed for about 1 year.
• Product scans: the ingredient text you check is not kept; a record that a scan was made, for whom, with its result and serving size, stays in the audit log (2 years).
• Meal plans, shopping lists and favourite recipes: deleted once they have not changed for about 2 years.
• Records of the privacy and cookie choices you make: about 2 years, except your latest choice, which is kept so that it can be honoured.
• Messages sent through the contact form: 6 months after the last reply or update.
• Audit and security records: about 2 years.
• Rate-limit counters, which slow down repeated attempts: no longer than 30 days.

Nothing that a privacy request covers is deleted while that request is open.

A data export you request is kept for 90 days, then expires. Backups of the service's data are kept on a rotating schedule and used only to restore the service: each daily backup for 7 days, each weekly backup for 5 weeks, each monthly backup for 12 months and each yearly backup for 7 years. Data deleted from the service stays in a backup only until that backup expires.

Your rights

• Access your data.
• Correct inaccurate data.
• Request deletion or restriction where appropriate. Deleting your account also deletes the household profile linked to your account and the dietary information on it; if you still eat with the household, it may add a fresh profile for you.
• Object to processing where the law allows.
• Withdraw consent at any time: for a person's health information, from their card in Dietary Settings (see "Health information and your consent"); for optional cookies, through the cookie banner.

Security

We use layered controls including authentication, role-based access, tenant isolation, audit logging, rate limiting, secure sessions, and hardened upload handling. No system can be guaranteed to be 100 percent secure, but the service is built to reduce risk and respond quickly to incidents.

Contact and complaints

Contact us through the secure contact form. You may also complain to the UK Information Commissioner's Office if you believe data protection law has been breached.