Privacy policy

Last updated October 20, 2026

Shoulder Chef is a recipe library with an AI cooking assistant, which we call "the chef". It is run by Monshaw, LLC of Chicago, Illinois ("we", "us"). This page says what we keep about you, who else touches it, and what you can do about it. If anything here is unclear, write to admin@monshaw.org.

What we keep

• Your account: your email address, the name you give, and a scrambled (hashed) form of your password. We cannot read your password.
• Your recipes: everything you save or import: titles, ingredients, steps, notes, tags, ratings, photos and the files you upload to import from, plus your meal plans, grocery lists, cook sessions and the conversations you have with the chef about a recipe.
• Your household: a household is the group of people who share one library. Members of the same household can see its recipes. Nobody outside it can.
• How the chef is used: for each chef request we record the date, which feature it was, the amount of text processed and an estimated cost, against your account. We do not store the text of your requests in this record. We use it to keep the service running and to understand what it costs.
• Security records: a short-lived record of failed sign-in attempts per email address (to lock out guessing), and a single-use, hashed token while a password reset is pending.
• Server logs: our web server keeps ordinary logs (such as the address a request came from and the page asked for) for troubleshooting and abuse prevention.

The chef and the AI providers

When you ask the chef to do something, such as importing a recipe from a photo or file, reviewing a recipe, answering a question, building a timeline or a grocery list, or making a picture, the relevant text or image is sent to an AI provider to produce the answer. We use Anthropic and Google (Gemini), and may add or change providers; we will update this page when we do. We use their paid programming interfaces, and under their current terms for those interfaces content sent that way is not used to train their models. Photos and documents you upload for import are sent the same way. Do not upload anything you would not want processed this way. The chef's answers are suggestions: dietary labels and food-safety notes are a guide, not a guarantee.

Who else handles your data

• DigitalOcean hosts the service and holds nightly backups, in its New York data centre in the United States.
• Resend delivers the emails we send you, such as password resets. It sees your email address and the message.
• Anthropic and Google, as described above.
• Google Fonts serves the typefaces our pages use, so your browser contacts Google when a page loads, which shares your IP address with Google.
• Apple (and Google Play, on Android) handle payment if you buy a subscription through the stores. We never see your card number.

We do not sell your data, we do not show ads, and we do not use advertising or analytics trackers. We may disclose information if the law requires it.

Cookies

We set one cookie, to keep you signed in. It is essential to the service. The mobile apps keep a sign-in token on your device for the same reason. We do not use cookies for tracking.

Keeping and deleting your data

• You can download all your recipes at any time from Settings › Your account.
• You can delete your account there too. If you are the last member of your household, deleting your account also erases the household and everything in it, immediately. If others remain, your account goes and the household keeps its recipes.
• A recipe you delete goes into a recycle bin for 30 days before it is permanently removed.
• Our nightly backups keep older copies for a limited time: up to 7 days on the server and up to 30 days in off-site storage. Deleted data ages out of them within 30 days and is not restored except to recover from a failure.
• Usage records are erased with the household when the last member leaves; if others remain, your account is detached from them. Records older than 90 days are moved into an archive file we keep for cost accounting. Failed sign-in records are short-lived.

Your choices and rights

You can see, correct, export or delete your information yourself in the app. For anything the app does not let you do, or to ask a question about your information, email admin@monshaw.org. Depending on where you live, you may have additional legal rights over your personal information, such as access, correction, deletion or objection; we will honour them.

Children

Shoulder Chef is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect their information. If you believe a child has given us theirs, tell us and we will delete it.

Security

Connections are encrypted (HTTPS), passwords are stored hashed, one household cannot see another's recipes, and photos are shown only to members of the household they belong to. No service is perfectly secure, so please use a password you do not use elsewhere.

Changes

If we change this policy in a way that matters, we will update the date above and, for significant changes, tell you in the app or by email.

Contact

Monshaw, LLC, Chicago, Illinois, United States · admin@monshaw.org