Privacy Policy

Last updated: 19 September 2026

Sustain is a shopping list and recipe app built by an independent developer. This policy explains what happens to your data — first in the app itself, then on this website.

The app

What data Sustain uses

Sustain stores your shopping lists, list items, recipes, meal plans, item categories, your list of shopping staples, the in-progress queue of ingredients when you're using Add to List to turn a meal plan into a shopping list, and app settings using Apple's iCloud (CloudKit). This data is stored in your own private iCloud account.

If you choose to share your kitchen with someone else (Settings → Share Everything…), Sustain uses Apple's CloudKit sharing feature to give up to 12 people access to your shopping lists, your whole recipe box, your meal planner, and your item categories/shopping staples, within their own iCloud accounts. Sustain uses your iCloud identity (as provided by Apple) to show who added something to a shared list or recipe. Calendar reminders set on a meal are the one exception — see "Reminders" below.

Every recipe you create also records an unreadable identifier for your iCloud account (not your Apple ID or email address — Apple doesn't let apps read either of those), plus an optional name you can set yourself in Settings ("Your name"). Neither is shown anywhere else in the app or shared with anyone as part of ordinary use; they exist so that if you export a recipe and pass it to someone else, there's a record of which account it originally came from.

Sustain's camera scanning features (barcode and label scanning when adding items, and scanning a recipe from a cookbook or recipe card) process images on your device only. Scanned images are not uploaded, stored, or sent anywhere by Sustain.

Importing a recipe from a web address

When you paste a recipe's web address into "Import from web", or share a recipe page to Sustain from Safari or another app, Sustain fetches that one page directly from your device — the same as opening it in a browser. This request goes straight from your device to the website you specified; Sustain has no server of its own in between, so the developer never sees the page or the address you fetched.

Where a website provides its recipe as structured data (most recipe sites do), Sustain reads that directly. Where it doesn't, the page's text is passed to Apple Intelligence's on-device model (see below) to pick out the recipe.

Barcode lookup

When you scan a barcode using Auto Add's barcode mode, Sustain sends the scanned number directly from your device to Open Food Facts, an open, crowdsourced product database, to look up the product's name. The request goes straight from your device to Open Food Facts; Sustain has no server of its own in between. If a barcode isn't found, Sustain simply falls back to the scanned digits as a starting point. Open Food Facts' data is used under the Open Database License (ODbL), and credited in Settings.

Apple Intelligence

On devices with Apple Intelligence available and switched on, Sustain uses Apple's on-device model to suggest recipe tags and help extract recipe details from unstructured web pages or scanned cookbook photos. This happens entirely on your device — nothing is sent to Sustain's developer or to Apple's servers for this purpose. Where Apple Intelligence isn't available, Sustain falls back to simple on-device keyword matching instead.

Reminders

Sustain can create a Calendar reminder for a planned meal. That event — which calendar it's on, its alert timing — lives only in your device's own Calendar app; Sustain never stores those details itself. If you share your kitchen, everyone in it can see that a reminder exists (its title, time, and any notes), but only its own creator can open, edit, or act on the real Calendar event, unless it's on a calendar the others already have access to.

Exporting recipes

Recipes → ⋯ → Export Recipes… saves your recipes to a file using the standard iOS save/share sheet, entirely under your control — Sustain has no server to send this file to. The exported file includes each recipe's creator identifier and, if set, creator name — if someone else imports that file, those values travel with it unchanged.

What Sustain does not do

• Sustain does not have its own servers and does not collect, store, or have access to your data — everything goes through Apple's iCloud/CloudKit directly, or, when importing a recipe or looking up a barcode, directly between your device and that website or Open Food Facts.
• Sustain does not use third-party analytics, advertising, or tracking services.
• Sustain does not sell or share your data with third parties, because the developer never has access to it in the first place.

Your data

Because your data lives in your own iCloud account rather than on any one device, you can delete it at any time by deleting the relevant lists or recipes in the app, or by removing Sustain's data via your iCloud account settings — either removes it everywhere, on every device signed into that account. Deleting the app itself only removes that device's local copy; your iCloud data is untouched, and reappears if you reinstall.

This website

sustain.kitchen is a plain, static website — it doesn't use cookies, analytics, or advertising of any kind.

• Dark mode. If you switch it, that choice is saved in your browser's local storage, on your device only. It's never sent anywhere and we never see it.
• The contact form. When you send a message via Support, your name, email address and message are sent, over an encrypted connection, to our transactional email provider (Resend) purely to deliver that one email to hello@sustain.kitchen — nothing is stored on this website itself, and it's never used for marketing or shared with anyone else.

Contact

If you have any questions about this policy, contact hello@sustain.kitchen, or use the contact form.