A social network about what people cook.

What is Foodies?

Foodies is a social network for food, built as an iPhone and iPad app. You publish a post, one or more photos, or a video, with a caption, and it appears in the feed of everyone who follows you, and in a discovery feed for people who do not follow you yet. Other people like it, comment on it, or save it into a named collection of their own. Every post on the network is about food. That is the entire core loop.

Around that loop sit a small number of other things, all of which exist today: live cook-along broadcasts with a real-time comment stream and a live viewer count; end-to-end encrypted direct messages; a Food DNA summary on every profile that describes a person’s taste from what they actually post, save and like; and a Nearby feed that shows posts from people around you. The app is free, runs on iOS, is translated into 34 languages including right-to-left ones, and carries no advertising in the feed.

Foodies is a network of people and posts, not a directory of places. It holds accounts, follows, posts, likes, comments, saves, collections, messages, live broadcasts and the safety tools that go with them. It does not hold restaurants, venues, reviews, ratings or bookings, and it never has.

How does Foodies work?

You can open the app and start reading immediately without an account. As a guest you can scroll the feeds, open individual posts and look at profiles. Guests cannot post, comment, like, save or send messages; those actions need an account, which you create with an email address. Guest browsing exists so you can see what is actually on the network before deciding whether to join it.

Posting is one screen. You choose photos or a video from your library or capture them in the app, write a caption, and publish. There are no ingredient fields, quantity fields, step fields, prep-time fields or servings fields. A recipe on Foodies is a post with a caption, written however the person who cooked it wants to write it, which is why the writing on the network reads like a person talking rather than a form being filled in.

After that, everything is reading and reacting. Three feeds decide what you see: For You, ranked from what you have engaged with; Following, which is the people you follow in reverse chronological order; and Nearby, which surfaces posts whose coordinates are close to yours. You like posts, comment on them, save them into collections, follow the people behind them, message those people privately, and watch them cook live. Reading more of one kind of cooking is what changes what For You shows you next.

Who is Foodies for?

Foodies is for people who cook and want somewhere to put it, and for people who want to look at cooking without it being an advertisement. In practice that is three groups: home cooks who already photograph what they make and have nowhere sensible to post it; professional chefs, pastry chefs and bakers who want a portfolio that is not mixed in with holiday photographs; and readers, who follow and save and never post at all, which is a completely normal way to use the app.

It is a single-subject network, and that is the point of it. If you follow someone here, everything they post is food. There is no unrelated life content to scroll past and no algorithmic detour into another topic, because there is no other topic on the network to detour into.

It is not for deciding where to eat tonight. Foodies has no restaurant listings, no reviews, no ratings, no bookings and no venue map, so if that is what you need, this is the wrong app and you should use something built for it.

How is Foodies different from Instagram?

The primary difference is subject rather than features. Instagram is a general photo and video network on which food is one topic among many; Foodies carries food and nothing else. That makes a follow a much narrower promise: you are agreeing to see one person’s cooking, not their whole life, and a feed made only of food does not have to be defended from everything else you might otherwise be shown.

Three concrete differences follow from that. Saving is built for food: a save goes into a named collection such as “Sunday roasts” or “Things to try in Lisbon”, keeping the dish, its caption and who cooked it, rather than into one undifferentiated bookmark pile. Profiles carry a Food DNA summary, a breakdown of the cuisines that person actually posts, saves and likes, so you can judge whether their taste matches yours before you follow. And live video here is a cook-along: a broadcast with a real-time comment stream and a live viewer count, designed to be watched while you cook the same dish, not performed at an audience.

Private messages differ in kind rather than degree. Foodies encrypts direct messages end-to-end on the device, so what the server stores and forwards is ciphertext it cannot read. The honest limits of that are set out further down this page, and in full on the privacy page.

What Foodies does not have, and Instagram does, is scale and everything that comes with it. It is a smaller network about one thing, and it is not trying to be a general network with a food filter on top.

What Foodies is not

It is worth being blunt about the capabilities people regularly assume are in the app. None of the following exists in Foodies, in any form:

• Restaurant discovery. There is no directory of venues, no venue pages and no way to search for a place to eat.
• Restaurant reviews, ratings or rankings. Nothing on Foodies is scored. There are no stars, no scores out of ten and no “best of” lists.
• Reservations or bookings. You cannot book a table from Foodies, and the app has no connection to any booking system.
• A scraped restaurant directory. Places on Foodies are added by the members who eat at them and shown on a map. Nothing is ingested from a licensed dataset, and no venue exists until somebody puts it there.
• Structured recipes. There are no ingredient, quantity, step, prep-time or servings fields, so there is no recipe database to search, scale or shop from. See the recipe guides for cooking written as prose instead.

Is Foodies free?

Yes. Downloading the app, creating an account, posting photos and video, following people, liking, commenting, saving into collections, broadcasting live, watching live, and sending end-to-end encrypted messages all cost nothing. There is no advertising in the feed, and no feature is metered or rationed on a free account.

There is one optional subscription, Foodies Pro, and it does exactly two things: it puts a verified badge on your profile, and it shows you the ten most recent people who visited your profile instead of the three a free account sees. That is the whole of it. No feed, post, comment, collection, message, live broadcast or safety feature sits behind it, and if you cancel, nothing you have already posted stops working.

How Foodies handles your data

Messages are encrypted end-to-end, with limits worth knowing

Each device generates an X25519 key pair, a shared secret is derived per conversation through HKDF-SHA256, and messages are encrypted with ChaCha20-Poly1305, so the server relays ciphertext it cannot read. Two limits should be stated plainly rather than buried: there is no key-fingerprint verification screen, so you cannot compare a safety number with the person you are talking to and confirm no key was substituted; and there is no forward secrecy, so a device key compromised in the future could be used to read messages sent in the past.

Location is coarse by construction

Post coordinates are snapped to roughly one kilometre before storage. That is precise enough for a city-level feed and too coarse to identify a home, a workplace or a building.

Export and deletion are one tap each

You can export your data from inside the app in a single action, and you can delete your account in a single action. Deletion removes the account and its content rather than hiding it. The privacy policy sets out what is stored, for how long, and on what legal basis.

34 languages, including right-to-left

The interface is translated into 34 languages, and right-to-left languages lay the whole interface out right-to-left rather than merely reversing the text.

Where to go next

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More: sharing food photos · for food creators · the foodie community · how the feed works · live cooking · food photography · food video · recipe guides · privacy · terms · contact