Privacy
What we share, and what we never do.
Data privacy is the number one reason restaurant operators hesitate on AI, ahead of both accuracy and cost. That's fair. So here is the whole thing in plain English, with no defined terms and no clause references.
What contributes to benchmarks
- Food cost as a percentage of your own net sales
- Labour cost as a percentage of your own net sales
- Prime cost percentage
- Broad category ratios — produce, protein, dairy, dry goods — as a share of total food purchases
- Coarse descriptors used only to build a cohort: service model, rough revenue band, region
What never leaves your account
- Any dollar amount — sales, purchases, payroll, profit
- Vendor names, item prices, invoice images, or item codes
- Recipes, menu prices, or dish-level costs
- Your restaurant's name, address, or anything that identifies it
- Employee names, hours, wages, or any payroll detail
- Anything at all, if you switch contribution off
The n ≥ 10 rule
A benchmark figure is only ever shown once at least ten distinct locations sit behind it. Below ten, you see a published industry figure with its source named, not a live cohort — because with six restaurants in a cohort, a peer number can be reverse-engineered back toward an individual. Before aggregation, values are winsorized at the 5th and 95th percentile, so one extreme restaurant can neither be identified nor drag the cohort.
Where a brand or franchisor runs a walled-garden pool, the same rule applies inside that pool — and the app tells you explicitly when you are looking at a published figure rather than live peers, and why.
Your AI conversations
Prompts and the data in them are sent to our AI provider to generate a response and are not used to train anyone's models. Your answers to daily questions are stored in your own organization's data and are used to make your own advice sharper — nobody else's.
Opting out, and getting out
Benchmark contribution is a single switch in the Privacy Center inside your account. Switching it off stops contribution immediately and removes your ratios from future aggregates. You keep every other feature; you simply see published figures instead of live cohorts. And Settings → Your data exports every table as CSV plus your original invoice files, in one click, with no support ticket and no waiting period.
The full security posture — tenant isolation, encryption, sessions, audit log — is on the security page. Questions we haven't answered here: privacy@nochef.app.