Privacy Policy
Effective date: October 06, 2026
Last updated: September 30, 2026
Mon Sous-Chef helps you plan meals from your recipes, your pantry and this week's grocery discounts. This policy explains, in plain terms, what personal information we collect, how and why, who we share it with, how long we keep it, and what your rights are.
In short
- We collect only what Mon Sous-Chef needs to work.
- We don't sell your information, and we use no advertising and no third-party analytics.
- The app, its database and your pantry photos are hosted in Montréal. Some of our providers (payment, artificial intelligence, our mailbox) process information outside Québec.
- You can export your data or delete your account yourself, at any time, from your settings.
Who we are
Mon Sous-Chef is operated by Guillaume Plante, 596, rue des Rochers, Boischatel (Québec) G0A 1H0.
Person in charge of the protection of personal information: Guillaume Plante, contact@monsouschef.ca.
Our personal information governance practices (roles, keeping and destruction, complaint handling) are described on the Personal Information Governance page.
How we collect your information
Directly from you: through the forms on the site and in the app (waitlist, sign-in, settings, recipes, pantry), through the photos you upload and the emails you send us. From Pinterest, only if you connect your account. Through a session cookie and your browser's storage (see "Cookies and browser storage").
What we collect
- Your account: your email address (you sign in with a link sent by email, no password), your language, the date you last signed in, the versions of the terms of use you accepted, when, how and in which language, and, if you choose to give it, your household size.
- What you add: your recipes (created or imported), your pantry, your meal plans, your grocery lists and your preferred stores.
- Pantry photos: if you photograph your pantry, the image is used only to recognise the food in it. It is first checked on our own servers: a photo showing people, documents or anything other than food is refused and deleted, and is never sent to our AI provider. Otherwise, it is deleted as soon as you confirm the items, or at most 24 hours after upload if you don't. The list of recognised items is cleared at the same time; only the items you confirm are added to your pantry.
-
Pinterest, if you connect it:
an access token (stored encrypted), the list of your boards, and the links of the pins on a
board you choose to import. We only ask to read your boards and pins
(
boards:read,pins:read): we never post, change or delete anything on Pinterest. Disconnecting Pinterest in your settings, or deleting your account, deletes the token, so we can no longer read anything from Pinterest. Pinterest doesn't let an app withdraw the permission you gave it; to remove Mon Sous-Chef from your Pinterest account as well, go to your Pinterest settings, under Security. - Subscription: payments are processed by Stripe. We never see or store your card number. We keep your Stripe customer ID, your subscription status, your plan, its renewal date, the payments we received, the record that we sent you a copy of your contract and, where applicable, your refunds. If you cancel, the reason and comment you choose to give are sent to Stripe with the cancellation.
- Waitlist: your email, your language and the date you confirmed your address.
- Internal usage statistics: some steps you take (for example, the onboarding steps or confirming a photo) are recorded with your account's identifier to improve the service. They stay with us and are deleted with your account.
- Technical data: our server logs record, for each request, your IP address, the page requested and your browser, for security and to keep the service running. They are deleted after 30 days. If you arrive through mysouschef.ca or monsouschef.com, Cloudflare (United States) redirects you to monsouschef.ca and sees your IP address and the address requested; we keep no record of it.
We use no advertising, no tracking cookies and no third-party analytics. We do not sell your personal information.
Why we use it
- To provide the service: meal plans, grocery lists, suggestions based on discounts.
- To import and structure your recipes, recognise the food in your photos and match your ingredients with the foods in our catalogue.
- To sign you in, send account emails and manage your subscription.
- To tell you when we launch.
- To keep the service secure and prevent abuse.
Meal plans are produced automatically, only when you ask for one, by a calculation that takes into account your recipes, your pantry and the discounts; it uses nothing about your browsing. They are suggestions: you can change or replace every meal.
Who we share it with
We rely on the following providers, only to run the service:
- Amazon Web Services (United States company; data stored in its Montréal region, in Québec) — hosting for the app and database, temporary storage of pantry photos, sending our emails (sign-in links and account notices) and our server logs.
- OpenAI (United States) — reading the text of recipes you import, translating recipes when you ask, recognising food in your photos, and matching the text of your ingredients, pantry and grocery lists with our catalogue. We never send it your email or any identifier of your account. Under its terms, OpenAI does not use this data to train its models and keeps it for at most 30 days to detect abuse.
- Stripe (United States) — payment processing and billing. Stripe receives your email and your language.
- Pinterest (United States) — only if you connect your Pinterest account.
- AppSignal (Netherlands) — technical monitoring of our servers, to detect errors and slowness. It receives the page requested (without the tokens in links), processing times and error messages, but not the content of your forms, your IP address or your email; an error message may occasionally contain something you entered. It adds no cookie or script to your browser.
- Google (United States) — our mailbox (Google Workspace): the emails you send us are kept there.
These providers may use your information only to provide their services to us, under their contractual commitments.
Amazon Web Services keeps your information in Québec, but it is an American company: the laws of the United States may require it to disclose information it holds to the authorities there, even when that information is stored in Canada.
OpenAI, Stripe, Pinterest and Google process your information outside Québec, in the United States or elsewhere. Once outside Québec, your information is subject to the laws there and may be disclosed to the courts and authorities that have jurisdiction there.
When you share a grocery list, anyone with the link can view it for 7 days.
If Mon Sous-Chef were sold or merged, your information could be disclosed to the buyer, who would have to protect it under this policy.
Who can access it on our side
Only Mon Sous-Chef's administrators — today, only its operator — have access, when needed for support, security or reviewing the food catalogue.
How long we keep it
- Your account information, and what you add to it, is kept for as long as your account exists.
- If nobody signs in to your account for 24 months and you have no active subscription, we email you a warning. If you don't sign in within 30 days of it, we delete the account, as if you had deleted it yourself.
- Pantry photos are deleted at most 24 hours after upload. The record of the scan (its date and status, without the image) is deleted 30 days after the photo is processed, or at the start of the next calendar month if that is later, since it counts toward the monthly photo limit.
- The record of each Pinterest pin you import (its link and the import's status) is deleted 90 days after the import. The recipe stays in your account.
- Grocery-list share links expire after 7 days.
- Internal usage statistics are deleted automatically after at most 13 months, or earlier with your account.
- If you don't confirm your address with the link we send you, your waitlist sign-up is deleted after 7 days.
- Your waitlist sign-up is deleted 30 days after we email you that Mon Sous-Chef has launched.
- Payments and refunds are kept 6 years after the end of the year they were made in, as tax laws require. The record that we sent you a copy of your subscription contract, and the record of each version of the terms of use you accepted, are kept 3 years after your subscription ends.
- If you delete your account, we delete your information, including your waitlist sign-up and your usage statistics. We keep only the billing records (payments, refunds, the record of your subscription contract and of the terms you accepted), no longer linked to an account, for the periods above.
- Our servers' logs are deleted after 30 days.
- Our database backups are kept for at most 35 days (daily ones for 7 days, then weekly ones): information we delete disappears completely from the backups within 35 days.
- A deleted photo may stay one or two more days in our storage's safety copy, then it is erased automatically.
Cookies and browser storage
-
_sous_chef_key— session cookie, needed to keep you signed in and remember your language. It is encrypted and disappears when you close your browser. -
phx:theme— your light or dark theme choice, kept in your browser until you change it. -
phx:language-suggestion-dismissed— remembers that you closed the language suggestion, kept in your browser.
These are needed for the site to work; we use no other cookies. If you block them, you won't be able to stay signed in.
Your rights
You can ask to access your personal information, have it corrected or deleted, withdraw your consent, or receive a copy in a structured, commonly used technological format, for yourself or for a person or body you designate. Under the conditions set by law, you can also ask us to stop disseminating information about you. In your settings, you can yourself, at any time:
- correct your profile (your language and your household size);
- change your email address: we send a link to the new address to confirm it, then a notice to the old one;
- export your data as a ZIP file: a JSON file and the pantry photos we still keep ("Export my data");
- delete your account ("Delete my account").
The export holds what you added to your account. To get all the information we hold about you, such as your waitlist entry, your usage statistics or our billing records, write to us.
To exercise your other rights, ask a question or make a complaint, write to our person in charge of the protection of personal information at contact@monsouschef.ca. We may ask you to confirm your identity. Access is free. We reply in writing within 30 days.
If you are not satisfied with our answer, you can contact the Commission d'accès à l'information du Québec or, if you live elsewhere in Canada, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.
Security
Traffic to Mon Sous-Chef is encrypted (HTTPS), your session cookie and Pinterest tokens are encrypted, and each person can access only their own data. If a confidentiality incident presents a risk of serious harm, we will notify you and the Commission d'accès à l'information, and we keep a register of such incidents.
Minors
Mon Sous-Chef is meant for adults. We do not knowingly collect information about anyone under 14.
Changes
We publish every change to this policy on this page. If a change is significant, we will also tell you by email or in the app before it takes effect.
Contact us
Guillaume Plante, doing business as Mon Sous-Chef — 596, rue des Rochers, Boischatel (Québec) G0A 1H0 — 581 992-9994 — contact@monsouschef.ca