Privacy Policy

Using the planner without an account. When you ask the logged-out planner for a plan, we process the meal request to build the result. We keep the request and its normalized form for 60 days so we can find weak or missing recipe coverage. A daily deletion process then removes both forms. We may keep a closed category such as a recognized dish, protein, cuisine, or meal category, along with coverage counts and the recipe identifiers returned, for longer. That learning record is not connected to a browser identifier, email address, account, household, IP address, or allergy and diet selections. The allergy and diet choices you make on that page stay in your own browser and travel with each request; we do not write them to our database before you have an account.

Joining the waitlist. If you enter your email address to join the Kalina beta waitlist, we collect and store:

• Your email address
• The date you signed up

Having a Kalina account.Kalina's account product is invite-only while it is in beta. If you accept an invitation and sign in, we collect and store:

• Your email address and the account identifier our login provider issues for you
• How your household runs: its name, time zone, how many people it plans for, which cooking equipment it has, and any budget band, weekly ritual, or busy-night pattern you tell us about
• The allergies, diets, and other food restrictions you record for each person, including any note you write on one
• What you tell us you have on hand, what Kalina plans, what you skip or swap, the shopping lists built from it, and leftovers and occasions you record
• A record of what Kalina did for you and when, so both of us can go back and see what happened

We never see or store your password. Our login provider handles signing you in. We do not collect payment information, and we do not access your calendar or contacts.

Your IP address. Our servers see your IP address on every request, as any web server does, and we use it briefly in memory to limit how often one source can hit our planning endpoints. We do not store it, and we do not attach it to your plans, your account, or the learning record above.

We do not use tracking cookies for advertising, and we do not sell your information.

Your list can hold anything from a serious allergy to a plain dislike. Some of it tells us about someone's health, so we treat all of it as sensitive personal information.

We use the food restrictions you record for one thing: deciding which recipes you can be shown, and building the plans and shopping lists that follow from that. The only exception is the opt-in described under How we use it, where a household can choose to let its outcomes join counts that point to no person and no household. We do not use it for advertising, we do not sell or share it, and we do not send it to our analytics provider or our error-monitoring provider.

We ask before we collect it. When you first record a restriction, we ask you to opt in, in a box that is not checked for you. We keep a record of that consent, including the date and the version of this policy that was in effect. Accepting our Terms of Service is not that consent and never stands in for it.

If we ever wanted to share this information with anyone beyond the providers who run Kalina for us, we would ask you again, separately, and you could say no and carry on using Kalina. You can withdraw either consent at any time by emailing privacy@kalinahelps.com, and the withdrawal applies to everything we do after we receive it.

If you live in Washington or Nevada, our Consumer Health Data Privacy Policy describes this information under your state's law, including which third parties and affiliates it reaches and how to ask us for a list of them. It is linked from our home page.

Allergen checking is a filter, and a filter may be incorrect or incomplete. It does not replace reading the label on the food you actually purchase, and you may not rely on it as the sole basis for any decision about what your household eats. The Terms of Service set out what that checking does and does not promise.

When you add someone to your household and record their allergies or diets, you are giving us information about another person. You may add someone only if you have their permission to give us their information and to act for them in Kalina, or you are their parent, legal guardian, or authorized caretaker. For anyone 18 or older, their own permission is required unless you are their legal guardian or authorized caretaker. Tell each person you add that we hold their information.

Everyone in a household shares one plan. Kalina does not build a per-person feed, ranking, or score, and it does not report on how any one member of a household behaved.

A request to access or delete a household's information covers the household record you control, including what you recorded about the people in it.

Kalina lets you take optional photos of your fridge, freezer, pantry, or spice rack so it can update what it thinks you have on hand. Photo capture is always optional, and the food-on-hand features work without it.

How we process it.The image goes to Google's Gemini vision model, working as a service provider to us, for one analysis that identifies the food items visible in it. We send it through Google's paid API, whose terms bar Google from using prompts or images to improve its products. Anything the photo contains, including text visible in the image, is treated strictly as content to read food items from. It is never treated as an instruction to Kalina.

What we keep. By default we keep only the list of items identified, never the image. We discard the photo as soon as the analysis returns. We do not store it, look at it, or use it to train anything.

The one exception. If you tick the consent box offered with photo capture, we keep that photo in a separate store so we can measure and improve how accurately this feature reads a real kitchen. Those photos are kept apart from your account data, held for up to 12 months and then deleted, and used only for that evaluation. You can withdraw that consent at any time by emailing privacy@kalinahelps.com, and we will delete them.

A photo of a fridge or a counter can catch people, reflections, mail, or other household detail you did not mean to send. That is why discarding the image is the default and keeping it takes a deliberate opt-in.

We use your email address to:

• Notify you when beta access opens
• Send occasional updates about Kalina's development
• Segment our waitlist internally (e.g., who signed up before vs. after a given date)
• Send you the messages that come with having an account, including the weekly notice that your week is ready

We use your household's information to plan its dinners, build its shopping lists, keep the product working, and answer you when you write to us. Every message we send has a way to stop receiving it, and you can ask us to stop by email.

We do not sell your information, and we do not share it with third parties for their own marketing purposes.

We use Amplitude to measure how the logged-out planner is used when production analytics is enabled. Amplitude receives explicit events such as a planner page view, a submitted request, a returned or failed plan, recipe cards shown or opened, serving-count changes, skipped or restored nights, shopping-list reveal, waitlist progress, and starting another plan.

Amplitude will use a random browser identifier stored for up to 90 days. It helps us estimate returning browsers; it does not identify a unique person. We do not send Amplitude the meal request, recipe titles or descriptions, email address, form contents, allergy or diet selections, household or account identifiers, full URLs or query strings, referrers, advertising identifiers, or arbitrary error messages. We do not use Amplitude Session Replay, automatic click or form capture, network capture, advertising attribution, or automatic page tracking.

You can turn product analytics off under Analytics choices below. Kalina also keeps analytics off when this browser sends a Global Privacy Control signal.

Combining households, only if you opt in.We may combine what households record into counts and patterns that point to no person and no household, and use those to understand how Kalina is used and make it better. A household's information goes into that only if it has separately opted in. Accepting our Terms of Service is not that choice. The opt-in is recorded, and a household can withdraw it at any time by emailing privacy@kalinahelps.com, after which nothing further from it goes into those counts.

Kalina is a small company and runs on other companies' infrastructure. Each one below processes data on our behalf, under its own privacy and security commitments. All but two are barred from using your data for anything beyond providing that service to us; Resend and Upstash keep narrow exceptions, described in their own entries below.

Each of them is under a written contract with us that limits it to processing on our documented instructions, requires it to keep your information confidential and secure, bars it from using your information for its own purposes, and requires it to delete or return it when our work with it ends.

• Vercel hosts the site and runs our server code, so it handles requests in transit and holds our server logs.
• Neon hosts the database where account and household information is stored.
• Auth0 handles signing in and holds your login credentials, which we never see.
• Resend sends waitlist and account email, including the weekly notice that your week is ready, and reports back whether a message was delivered. Its contract with us carves out the address a message went to as data of its own, which it can use to catch fraud, keep its systems secure, meet legal requirements, and other purposes the law allows.
• Upstash holds two short-lived counters, each looked up by a scrambled code rather than your name or email: one stops a scheduled email from sending twice if a job re-runs, and one limits how often a calendar feed link can be fetched. Its contract with us also lets it use this data to improve its own service, and to keep aggregate records that identify no one even after the underlying data is deleted.
• Google Workspace receives waitlist signups through a webhook, into a spreadsheet that only we can open, under our business agreement with Google.
• Anthropic and Google provide the AI models described under AI models and training data below.
• Cloudflare R2 stores the evaluation photos of people who opted into keeping them.

We use Sentryto record technical errors on our servers, so we can find and fix faults in the service. Those reports carry technical detail about what broke. We turn off Sentry’s default collection of personal data, and we do not send your name, email address, IP address, or any identifier for you or your household. Sentry runs only on our servers and never in your browser, so it does not record your screen, your clicks, or your browsing.

When analytics is enabled and has not been turned off, Amplitude processes the limited planner events and random browser identifier described above on our behalf in its United States data region. Amplitude does not receive the planner's meal text or waitlist form contents from us.

Kalina is built on large language models from Anthropic, which does the planning, and Google, which reads kitchen photos. Both are called only from our servers. No AI model runs in your browser, and no model ever receives your login credentials.

The planning model receives a candidate list of dishes already filtered to your household's restrictions, and how your household cooks. That filtering runs separately, in code, before the model ever sees the list. We do not send it your email address, your login identifier, or any account, person, or household identifier.

These models were trained by their providers on a mix of licensed data, publicly available data, and data from human trainers and reviewers. Your information is not part of that. We do not use it to train a model, and we hold both providers to terms that stop them from doing so: Anthropic's commercial terms bar it from training on what we send, and Google's paid API terms bar it from using our prompts or images to improve its products. We would need your separate, explicit consent before any of that changed.

A model deciding which dinner to suggest is never the thing that decides whether a dish is safe for your household. That check runs separately, in code, on every dish.

Kalina does not make automated decisions about you that produce legal or similarly significant effects. Nothing it does decides anything about your money, your job, your housing, your schooling, your insurance, or your health care. It suggests dinners. What a model produces is a prediction rather than a fact, and it can be wrong.

Product analytics is allowed on this browser. It runs only when Kalina has production analytics enabled.

This choice applies only to this browser. Clearing its site data also clears the saved choice.

We do not use advertising cookies or cross-site tracking cookies of any kind. What we do use:

• A session cookie from our login provider, so that signing in keeps you signed in. It is required for the account product to work.
• Your own browser's storage on the logged-out planner, holding the meal you typed, the allergy and diet chips you picked, and your analytics choice, so a refresh does not lose them. Clearing this site's data clears all of it.
• A random analytics identifier, described above, only while product analytics is enabled and you have not turned it off.

• Logged-out planner request text: 60 days, then removed by a daily deletion process
• The anonymous coverage record described above: longer, because it is not connected to you
• Waitlist email address: until you ask us to remove it
• Account and household information: for as long as your account is open, and we delete it within 45 days after you ask us to close it
• Photos: discarded as soon as the analysis returns, except photos you opted into keeping, which are held up to 12 months
• The random analytics identifier: up to 90 days
• Server error reports: kept by our error-monitoring provider on its own schedule, and they carry no identifier for you
• Backups: anything you ask us to delete leaves our backups within 30 days of the deletion
• Anything we are required to keep for a legal claim or investigation: kept until that matter ends, and then deleted on the schedule above

When we delete your information, we may keep records we need to document consent, comply with law, or resolve a dispute, along with records that no longer identify anyone. We also keep aggregate records that identify no one, such as counts of how often the logged-out planner is used, and the opt-in household counts described under How we use it. Those counts point to nobody and are not covered by a deletion request.

Traffic to and from Kalina is encrypted in transit, and the database and the photo store are encrypted at rest. Our database and our photo storage are reachable only by our own servers: no photo URL, signed or otherwise, is ever handed to a browser. Credentials for every service above live in our hosting provider's environment settings, scoped per environment, and never in our code or in your browser.

Access is limited to the people who need it to run Kalina. If information about you is ever taken or exposed in a way that is likely to harm you, we will tell you, and we will tell the regulators the law requires us to tell, as quickly as we can and within the time the law allows.

No service can promise perfect security, and we would rather say that plainly than imply otherwise.

You can ask us to access, correct, or delete your information at any time by emailing privacy@kalinahelps.com. You can also ask for a copy of it in a format you can open and take somewhere else. We may need to check that the request is really coming from you before we act on it. To do that we will ask for the email address on your account and, if you have one, the name of your household, and we will send a confirmation to that email address. Someone else can make a request for you if you give them signed written permission and we can confirm it with you. We will not treat you differently for exercising any of these rights.

California residents have specific rights under the CCPA and CPRA: to know what we hold, to delete it, to correct it, to opt out of the sale or sharing of personal information, and to limit how sensitive personal information is used. We do not sell or share personal information. We will respond to any request within 45 days, and tell you if we need longer.

If we say no, we will tell you why, and you can ask us to think again by replying to that email with the word "appeal." A different person reviews it and we answer within 45 days. If the answer is still no, we will tell you how to complain to the attorney general of the state you live in.

Direct marketing. We do not disclose your personal information to anyone for their own direct marketing. If you are a California resident and would like that confirmed in writing, email privacy@kalinahelps.com.

The person responsible for our privacy practices is our Privacy Contact, reachable at privacy@kalinahelps.com and at Kalina Technologies Corp., PO Box 412, Victoria, MN 55386.

If you live in Washington or Nevada, you can also ask us for a list of the third parties and affiliates that have received your health information, and you can withdraw your consent to our collecting or sharing it. Our Consumer Health Data Privacy Policy explains how.

Kalina honors the Global Privacy Control signal, described under Analytics choices above. We do not respond to older Do Not Track browser headers, which never settled on an agreed meaning.

Kalina is for adults. You must be 18 or older to use it, and we do not knowingly collect information directly from children. A parent or guardian may record a child's allergies as part of setting up a household, which is information about a child given to us by the adult responsible for them, and we hold it under this policy. We never sell or share the personal information of anyone under 16, and we do not sell or share anyone's information at all. By using Kalina you confirm that you are 18 or older, and that where you record information about someone else in your household you are the person responsible for them or have their permission.

Kalina records food preferences for each person in a household, children included, because that is how it plans meals the whole table will eat. Those preferences are used to plan your household's meals and for nothing else. We do not build advertising or behavioral profiles of anyone, we do not market to children, and Kalina never ranks or scores a person.

Kalina operates in the United States, and the services listed above process this information in the United States. Kalina is not offered to people in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, or Switzerland, and we do not aim it at them. If you reach Kalina from outside the United States anyway, your information will be handled here.

Kalina is still being built, and features that change what we collect are still ahead of us, including paid plans, calendar access, and ordering groceries on your behalf. We will update this policy before any of those starts handling your data, and post the update here with a new date at the top. If a change is significant, we will make a reasonable effort to tell you before it takes effect.

Questions about this policy or your data: privacy@kalinahelps.com

If you live in Washington or Nevada, the food restrictions you record with us are consumer health data under your state's law. Those laws require us to describe that information in a document of its own, separate from this policy. Our Consumer Health Data Privacy Policy does that, and it is linked from our home page. It sets out what health data we collect, where it comes from, why we collect it, who we share it with, which third parties and affiliates it reaches, and how you access it, delete it, or withdraw your consent to it.