Privacy, plainly

Only what a recipe needs to be written:

• — The description you type on Create.
• — How many servings, and your cooking level if you have set one.
• — When you edit a recipe, that recipe and the changes you asked for.

Before your description is sent, Zest strips things a recipe never needs: email addresses, links, long strings of digits, and names that follow a relationship — “my daughter Sofia” is sent as “my daughter”. The relationship is useful context about who is eating; the name is not.

• — Your email address, your name, or your account id.
• — Your library: what you saved, what you cooked, what you rated.
• — Any recipe other than the one you are editing right now.
• — Anything at all when you are browsing, saving, or cooking.

A model is only ever called when you press Generate or apply a change. Nothing about your account is used to personalise anyone else’s recipes, and your recipes are never used as training material by Zest.

Zest does not run its own models. Your description is sent to an AI provider — currently DeepSeek, sometimes OpenAI — and what they do with it is governed by their terms, not by ours. We can tell you exactly what we send them. We cannot promise what happens to it after that.

So the practical advice is the honest one: treat the Create box like any other text box on the internet. Do not type anything into it you would not want a company to hold.

Everything you write starts unlisted: not in the public library, not in search, not visible to other cooks. It stays that way unless you publish it, which is a separate, deliberate act. Anyone you send the link to can open it — that is what the link is for.

Your account holds what you would expect: your email, your recipes, what you saved and cooked, and a count of how many generations you have used. You can delete your account and everything in it from your account page.

Zest is in beta and run by one person. There is no advertising, no analytics sold on, and no third party buying any of this.

There is no cookie banner on Zest because there is nothing to ask you about. Until you sign in, Zest sets no cookies at all — no analytics, no advertising, no tracking of any kind, first party or third.

Once you sign in

• — A session cookie, so you stay signed in. It is what tells Zest which library is yours. Signing out removes it.
• — While a sign-in link is in flight, a short-lived cookie that proves the link was opened in the browser that asked for it.

Saved in this browser, never sent anywhere

• — Whether you want the screen kept awake while cooking.
• — A recipe you are part-way through writing, so a reload does not lose it.
• — Small display preferences, like which facets you last browsed by.

These live in your browser’s own storage on this device. Clearing your browsing data removes them, and nothing is lost that is not already on your account.

One thing from elsewhere

The “confirm you are human” check on the sign-up and invite forms is Cloudflare Turnstile. It runs only on those pages, and it is there to stop a bot minting accounts that would spend real money on AI. Fonts are served from Zest itself, not from Google.

Everything above is either what signs you in or what you asked for by using a feature. None of it follows you anywhere.

Things will break, and recipes an AI writes can be wrong. Read a method through before you cook it, and use your own judgement on times and temperatures — especially for meat, fish and anything preserved. If something looks wrong, the Feedback button is on every page.