Privacy Policy

🏠 Who we are

Kitchya is a meal planning and kitchen management application developed and operated as an independent project based in the United Kingdom. References to “Kitchya”, “we”, “us” or “our” in this policy refer to the Kitchya service and its operator.

Questions about this policy? Contact us at hello@kitchya.com.

📋 What information we collect

Information you give us directly

• First name — used to personalise the greeting and AI messages. Stored only on your device.
• Email address and password — collected when you create a Kitchya account. Used to authenticate you, send a welcome message, and enable password reset. Stored securely via Firebase Authentication.
• Family Sync PIN — a PIN you create or join to link your household’s shared data.

Information stored on your device

• Your meal plan (recipes assigned to days)
• Your pantry items (names, quantities, expiry dates, categories)
• Your shopping list and budget preferences
• Allergen and dietary preference settings
• Cuisine preferences and cooking style settings
• Household settings (number of adults, children and child age range)
• Special occasions — cultural occasion toggles and household birthdays or anniversaries (name and date only; birth years are not collected)
• Home page layout preferences (which cards are shown)
• Custom recipes you create
• Family notes
• Random dinner generator spin credits (daily count only, stored locally)
• Bread and bake session progress
• Recipe library cache — the Kitchya recipe library is fetched from Firebase and cached in your browser’s session storage for performance. This resets when you close your browser.

Information collected when using Family Sync

If you choose to enable Family Sync, the following data is transmitted to and stored in our secure Firebase Realtime Database (hosted in the EU — Europe West region) so that your household can share a live view:

• Meal plan, pantry items, shopping list, and family notes
• Household preferences (allergens, dietary settings, cuisines, cooking style, household size, occasions)
• Your first name (to identify who made changes)
• Your device’s anonymous UUID (a randomly generated identifier — not linked to your identity)

Community price intelligence

When you scan a supermarket receipt, Kitchya extracts the item prices and store name alongside the product names. This anonymised price data — the item name, price paid, and supermarket — is contributed to a shared community price database stored in our Firebase Realtime Database. This data is used to improve the accuracy of supermarket price comparisons for all Kitchya users.

Price records older than 60 days are treated as stale and deprioritised in comparisons, as prices change over time. You may request deletion of price contributions associated with your receipts by contacting us, though as the data is fully anonymised this may not always be technically possible.

Technical information collected automatically

When you use Kitchya we may automatically receive standard technical information including device type, operating system, browser type, and anonymous error logs. We do not use cookies for tracking, analytics, or advertising. We do not use Google Analytics or any third-party tracking scripts.

⚙️ How we use your information

✨ AI features

Meal suggestions

Kitchya uses the Anthropic Claude API to generate personalised meal suggestions. When you request AI suggestions, a prompt is sent to Anthropic’s servers containing your pantry items, dietary preferences, allergen settings, household size, child age range, any special occasions today, and any free-text notes you add.

Home page AI features

The Menu Inspiration card, Daily Kitchen Tip, and Drink Pairing card send anonymised context to Anthropic’s API to generate their content. This includes the current month and season, your dietary preferences and allergens, alcohol-free preference, child age range (if applicable), and any special occasions today. No personal identifiers are included.

Random dinner generator

The dinner generator runs entirely on your device using your local pantry and preference data. No data is sent externally. Spin credits (a daily count of up to 3) are stored locally on your device only.

Receipt scanning

The receipt scanning feature allows you to photograph a supermarket receipt. The image is sent to Anthropic’s Claude API, which extracts food and household product names, prices, and the store name to add items to your pantry. Kitchya instructs the AI to extract product names, prices and store name only — and to ignore payment details, card information, totals and transaction references. The image is not stored by Kitchya — it is processed in transit and discarded.

The extracted item prices and supermarket name (but not the receipt image or any personal information) are stored anonymously in our community price database to improve supermarket price comparisons for all users. See the Community price intelligence section above for full details.

🎉 Special occasions data

Kitchya allows you to add household birthdays and anniversaries so the app can acknowledge them on the day. We collect only the name and date (day and month) — birth years are deliberately not collected or stored. This data is stored locally on your device and, if Family Sync is enabled, shared within your household via the secure Firebase database.

Cultural and religious occasion toggles (such as Eid, Diwali, Passover) are stored as simple on/off settings within your household preferences. No religious affiliation is inferred or recorded beyond the toggles you explicitly set.

🤝 Who we share your data with

We do not sell, rent, or trade your personal information. We share data only with the following service providers, strictly to operate Kitchya:

Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs) are in place where data is transferred outside the UK/EU, in line with UK GDPR requirements.

🔒 Your rights

Under UK GDPR you have the following rights regarding your personal data:

• Right to access — request a copy of the data we hold about you
• Right to rectification — ask us to correct inaccurate data
• Right to erasure — ask us to delete your data (“right to be forgotten”)
• Right to restrict processing — ask us to limit how we use your data
• Right to data portability — receive your data in a structured, machine-readable format
• Right to object — object to processing based on legitimate interests
• Right to withdraw consent — withdraw consent at any time where processing is based on consent

How to exercise your rights

Most of your data is stored on your own device — you can delete it at any time by clearing the app’s local storage or uninstalling the app. For data held by us (email address, Family Sync data), contact us at hello@kitchya.com and we will respond within 30 days.

Withdrawing email consent

Every email we send includes an unsubscribe link. You can also email us directly at any time to be removed.

📅 How long we keep your data

👪 Children’s privacy

Kitchya is intended for use by adults and families. The app is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you believe a child under 13 has provided us with personal information, please contact us and we will delete it promptly.

Kitchya allows households to record that children are present and their approximate age range (e.g. “under 5”, “primary age”, “teens”). This is used only to tailor meal suggestions to be age-appropriate. No child’s name or any personally identifiable information about children is collected.

Family Sync is designed for household sharing between adults. Children using the app as part of a family household do so under the supervision and responsibility of a parent or guardian.

🛡️ Security

We take reasonable technical and organisational measures to protect your data:

• All data in transit is encrypted using HTTPS/TLS
• Firebase data is protected by server-side security rules
• User accounts are managed via Firebase Authentication with email verification
• Netlify serverless functions validate all requests before processing
• Passwords are never stored by Kitchya — handled exclusively by Firebase Authentication
• Birth years for household occasions are deliberately not collected
• Community price data is fully anonymised before storage

No method of transmission or storage is 100% secure. If you become aware of any security issue, please contact us immediately at hello@kitchya.com.

📝 Changes to this policy

We may update this privacy policy from time to time. When we do, we’ll update the “last updated” date at the top and — for significant changes — notify registered users by email. Continued use of Kitchya after changes constitutes acceptance of the updated policy.