Privacy Policy

1. Who we are

Christopher Whincup, trading as Kella, provides the Kella cooking app and kella.app as a sole trader based in the United Kingdom. He is responsible for deciding how your personal information is used.

Correspondence address: 15 Millgates, York, YO26 6AT, United Kingdom. Privacy requests: support@kella.app.

2. What data we collect

When you use Kella, we may collect:

• Account information: Your email address, account identifier, and any profile name supplied by your email or supported sign-in provider.
• Grocery list data: Items you add to your shopping lists, including item names, categories, quantities, and notes.
• Cooking content: Saved recipes, generated recipes, recipe ingredients, cooking steps, recipe edits, meal plans, shopping-list handoff data, and kitchen preferences such as household size, diet, allergies or hard exclusions, preferred cuisines, proteins, cooking goals, cooking ability, and preferred cook time.
• AI requests: Messages, recipe text, ingredients, preferences, grocery summaries, food photos, and related cooking context you choose to send to Kella AI features.
• Photos: Food photos selected for photo-to-recipe interpretation and compressed private captured-photo derivatives linked to saved photo-generated recipes.
• Subscription data: Your subscription status and purchase history, managed by RevenueCat.
• Device and notification information: Device identifiers, basic device type, operating system version, push notification tokens, and account-linked crash, performance and operational diagnostics for compatibility, notifications, and support.
• Optional usage data: If you enable usage analytics in Settings, PostHog receives account-linked product interaction events, subscription-state traits, and feature and purchase-flow events to help us improve the app. It derives approximate location from the connection IP before discarding the stored client IP; Kella does not request device GPS for this analytics use.

3. How we use your data

We use your personal data to:

• Provide and maintain the Kella service, including syncing your grocery lists across devices.
• Authenticate your identity and secure your account.
• Process subscriptions and manage premium features.
• Enable invited household and list workflows when those features are available.
• Power AI cooking features, including chat assistance, recipe generation, meal ingredients, recipe steps, food-photo recipe interpretation, and recipe images.
• Send push notifications you enable.
• Improve our app through optional product analytics when you enable it, and necessary operational diagnostics.
• Send transactional emails (e.g. magic link sign-in, list invitations).

Account emails are used for sign-in, support and service messages, not marketing or advertising.

4. Legal basis for processing

We process your data under the following legal bases:

• Contract: Authentication, saved cooking content, synchronisation, subscription access and service communications needed to provide the features you request.
• Legitimate interests: Proportionate security, misuse prevention, troubleshooting and service reliability. You can object to processing based on these interests.
• Consent: Optional product analytics, sharing information for AI cooking features, and explicit consent to processing health information you choose to provide for personalised cooking suggestions. Analytics and AI choices are separate. Ingredient exclusions are not automatically treated as a medical diagnosis.
• Legal obligations: Records or disclosures required by applicable law.

Foods to avoid are optional. The statement beside the existing Continue or Save action explains how those choices are saved and used. Chat explains processing of your message and conversation context before Send. These permissions do not authorize model training. Remove saved choices in My Kitchen or turn AI off in Settings to stop future AI requests. Withdrawal does not erase earlier results or cancel requests already in progress; you can separately request deletion.

5. Data storage and security

Your data is stored securely using Supabase, which provides encrypted database storage and secure authentication. Data is hosted on cloud infrastructure with industry-standard security measures including encryption at rest and in transit.

Some pre-sign-in preferences are stored on your device. Opening the app, loading subscription plans, sign-in and operational diagnostics can still involve network requests before you have a named account.

6. Third-party services

We use the following third-party services:

• Supabase: Database, authentication, storage, Edge Functions, account deletion, and real-time sync.
• RevenueCat: Subscription and in-app purchase management.
• Resend: Transactional email delivery (magic links, invitations).
• Google Sign-In / Apple Sign-In: Optional third-party authentication.
• PostHog: Optional product analytics to understand feature usage and improve the app. It stays off until you enable Share usage analytics in Settings for this account on this device. Turn it off or sign out to stop new analytics collection. Events already collected while enabled may finish delivery; turning it off does not delete existing records. Session recording and autocapture are disabled.
• Sentry: Crash reporting and error monitoring to identify and fix bugs quickly.
• Google Gemini: AI-powered cooking, meal-planning, recipe, grocery categorization fallback, and food-photo interpretation features. Depending on the feature, prompts may include messages, grocery summaries, recipe text, ingredients, preferences, and food photos.
• OpenAI: Cooking assistance, meal ingredients, recipe creation, completion and editing, grocery categorization, and AI-assisted recipe import. Requests can include messages, cooking instructions, recipe text, ingredients and the preferences needed for that workflow.
• Z.ai: Available rollback routes for text-based cooking assistance, meal ingredients, grocery categorization and recipe import. When used, these requests can include recipe text, messages, ingredients and preferences. Food photos are processed by Google Gemini; image bytes are not sent to Z.ai.
• fal.ai / Qwen Image: AI image generation for recipe images. Recipe titles or image prompts are sent when generating images.
• Langfuse: AI operational monitoring. Kella's operational exporter sends account identifiers and request metadata such as provider, latency, usage and cost, rather than raw message or photo bodies.
• Apple Push Notification service: Delivery of push notifications you enable.

Recipients depend on the feature and active workflow; your information is not sent to every AI provider for every request. Necessary inference, provider security retention and model training are separate activities. Kella does not use the information you enter or identifying derivatives to train models, and does not authorize its AI providers to do so.

Overseas processing and human access

Service providers may process information outside your country, including in the United States and other provider processing locations. A hosting region does not mean all processing stays there. Where legally required, international transfers need applicable contractual or other transfer safeguards. Contact support@kella.app for information about safeguards relevant to your request.

The sole operator does not routinely inspect your cooking content. Necessary support, security, misuse or legal investigations may require limited access. Provider personnel may have access under their own support, security and contractual arrangements; account-linked content is not anonymous merely because it is not routinely read.

7. Data sharing

We do not sell your personal data to third parties. Your grocery list, recipe, and household/list invite data is shared only with users you explicitly invite when sharing features are available. AI cooking features are blocked until you allow AI data sharing, and you can withdraw that consent in Settings. If you enable optional analytics, we use the resulting statistics to improve Kella.

8. Data retention

Saved account and cooking information is retained to provide your saved content until you remove it or delete your account. Temporary processing records, usage and security records can follow separate cleanup schedules. Retention depends on the purpose, support or security need and applicable legal obligations. Consent receipts record the statement version and action, without copying your allergy details or messages into the receipt.

Account deletion removes primary account-linked app data and private food-photo objects covered by the deletion process. It does not automatically erase every provider log, backup, billing record or previously shared image. Provider media and operational records may remain until provider expiry settings or a separate deletion process removes them; Kella does not promise universal immediate deletion or zero provider retention. Contact us for a deletion request covering those systems.

Deleting Kella does not cancel Apple or Google billing. Cancel subscriptions separately in your store account.

9. Your rights

Under UK GDPR, you have the right to:

• Access: Request a copy of the personal data we hold about you.
• Rectification: Request correction of inaccurate data.
• Erasure: Request deletion of your data (you can do this directly via Settings > Delete Account).
• Portability: Request your data in a portable format.
• Object: Object to processing based on legitimate interests.
• Withdraw consent: Where processing is based on consent, you can withdraw it at any time. You can withdraw AI data-sharing consent in Settings.
• Restriction and complaints: Ask us to restrict processing where applicable, or complain to your local data-protection regulator.

Contact support@kella.app to exercise your rights. We may need to verify your identity. Your rights depend on applicable law and the processing involved. You can complain to the UK Information Commissioner's Office.

10. Children's privacy

Kella is for adults aged 18 and over. The existing onboarding and AI data-sharing actions explain this requirement. The account's AI acceptance receipt records the statement version, not a date of birth or identity document. This is a self-declaration, not independent age verification.

Do not provide personal or health information about children in AI requests. If you believe a child's information has been supplied, contact support@kella.app so that we can investigate and handle the request.

11. Changes to this policy

We may update this privacy policy from time to time. We will notify you of significant changes through the app or by email. Where a new purpose or processing activity requires fresh consent, we will request it; continued use alone is not consent to new processing.

12. Contact us

If you have any questions about this privacy policy or your personal data, please contact us at:

support@kella.app