Photo and video posts

A post is one or more photographs, or a video, with a caption. You choose the media from your library or capture it in the app, write whatever you want to say about the dish, and publish. The post then appears in the Following feed of everyone who follows you and is eligible for the For You and Nearby feeds of people who do not.

There are no ingredient, quantity, step, prep-time or servings fields. This is deliberate. A form with those fields turns cooking into data entry and produces writing that reads like a database record, and most of what is worth saying about a dish, that the pan has to be hotter than you think, that you used the wrong flour and it was better, does not fit in a field. A recipe on Foodies is a post with a caption. If you want structured technique writing, the recipe guides on this site do that job in prose.

Video is a first-class post type rather than a separate product with its own tab. A thirty-second clip of a sauce coming together carries information a still photograph cannot. Food photography and food video cover how to shoot both well.

For You, Following and Nearby feeds

Foodies has three feeds, and you choose between them rather than being handed one.

For You is ranked. It learns from what you open, like, save and watch to the end, and it exists so that a network you have just joined is worth reading before you have followed anybody.
Following is the people you follow, newest first, with nothing inserted and nothing reordered. It exists because a follow should mean something: if you asked to see someone, you see them.
Nearby shows posts from people around you, ordered by proximity and recency. It exists because what is good to cook is seasonal and local, and because the most useful person to follow is often someone shopping in the same market as you.

Nearby is a feed of posts, not a map of venues. Post coordinates are snapped to roughly a one-kilometre grid before they are stored, so no post is ever tied to an address or a building. Nearby answers “what are people cooking and eating in my city”. Places are a separate feature: members add the venues they eat at, and those appear on a map you can browse.

How the food feed works goes into what each feed shows and how quickly For You responds to what you do.

Following and followers

Following is one-directional: you follow an account, that account’s posts enter your Following feed, and they are told they have a new follower. There is no request to accept and no mutual-friend requirement. Unfollowing is immediate and silent.

The follow graph exists because a food network is only useful if you can commit to people rather than to topics. A hashtag gives you everything anyone ever labelled “pasta”; a follow gives you one person’s judgement, repeatedly, which is what actually teaches you to cook differently.

Likes, comments and saves

Three distinct actions sit under every post, and they mean three different things.

A like is applause. It tells the person you saw it and it feeds into what For You shows you next.
A comment is a conversation in public under the post. Comments are where the useful part usually is: which flour, how hot, how long, what went wrong.
A save is for you rather than for them. It puts the post into one of your collections so you can find it again months later.

Keeping saving separate from liking is the important part. On networks where the two are the same gesture, the archive you build is a record of what you approved of, not a record of what you intend to cook.

Named collections

A collection is a named, ordered list of saved posts: “Sunday roasts”, “Things to try in Lisbon”, “Bread I have not managed yet”. You can have as many as you like, and any post you can see can go into one.

Collections exist because an undifferentiated bookmark pile stops being usable at about sixty items. A saved post keeps its photograph, its caption and the person who cooked it, so what you saved in March still makes sense in November, you can see not just the dish but who made it and what they said about it, and you can go back and ask them.

Live cook-along broadcasts

Any account can start a live broadcast from the app. Viewers join while it is running, comment in a real-time stream you can read as you cook, and the broadcaster sees a live viewer count for who is in the room at that moment.

It is built as a cook-along rather than as a performance. The premise is that the person watching has the same pan on the same hob, so the parts of cooking that are dead time on an edited video, waiting for the water, waiting for the braise, are the parts where the chat earns its place. Questions get answered at the moment they matter, which is the one thing a recorded video can never do.

Foodies does not keep a stored replay of a broadcast. A live exists while it is running, and the chat with it. Live cooking on Foodies covers how to run one that holds an audience through the waiting.

End-to-end encrypted direct messages

You can message any account you can see. Each device generates an X25519 key pair, a shared secret is derived per conversation through HKDF-SHA256, and message bodies are encrypted with ChaCha20-Poly1305. What our server stores and forwards is ciphertext it cannot read.

Two limits are worth stating plainly rather than leaving in a footnote. There is no key-fingerprint verification screen, so you cannot compare a safety number with the other person to confirm that no key was substituted in transit. And there is no forward secrecy: a device key compromised in the future could be used to read messages that were sent in the past. The encryption is real and it is not the same thing as Signal’s. The privacy policy describes exactly what the server holds.

Encrypted messages exist because the private half of a food network is people swapping photographs of their own kitchens, their own homes and their own children eating dinner, and that should not be readable by the company running the network.

Food DNA taste summary

Every profile carries a Food DNA summary: a breakdown of the cuisines and kinds of cooking that person actually posts, saves and likes, derived from their real activity rather than from a questionnaire they filled in when they signed up.

It exists to solve the moment before a follow. A grid of twelve attractive photographs does not tell you whether someone bakes constantly, cooks Sichuan food twice a week or posts one thing a month. Food DNA answers that in a glance, so following becomes a decision rather than a gamble, and it reads your own taste back to you in a form you may not have articulated yourself.

Blocking, reporting and muting

Blocking is mutual and total: a blocked account cannot see your posts, follow you, comment on your posts, appear in your feeds or message you, and you do not see them either. Muting is quieter, it removes someone from your feed without telling them and without severing the follow. Reporting sends a post, comment or account to us for review, with the reason attached.

These exist because a network without them is not usable by the people most worth having on it. Block and mute are separate on purpose: most of the time you do not want a confrontation, you just want a feed that is pleasant again, and mute does that without anyone being told.

Guest browsing without an account

You can open Foodies and read it without signing up. As a guest you can scroll the feeds, open individual posts and look at profiles. Guests cannot post, comment, like, save or send messages, every one of those needs an account, because every one of them attaches your name to something another person sees.

Guest browsing exists because asking someone to create an account before showing them anything is asking them to judge a network they have not seen. The account is free and takes an email address; the point is that you decide after looking, not before.

Data export and account deletion

Both are one tap, inside the app, without writing to support and without waiting on a queue. Export gives you your data. Deletion removes your account and its content rather than deactivating or hiding it.

They are in the app rather than in a form because a right you have to request by email is a right with a friction tax on it. The privacy policy sets out what is stored, for how long and on what basis.

34 languages, including right-to-left

The interface is translated into 34 languages. Right-to-left languages lay the entire interface out right-to-left, navigation, buttons, alignment, rather than merely flipping the direction of the text inside a left-to-right layout.

Cooking is the least English-speaking subject there is, and a food network that only works properly in English is a food network missing most of the food. Captions are written by people in their own language; the app should not make that awkward.

Foodies Pro

Pro is an optional subscription. It does two things, and they are the only two things it does:

A verified badge on your profile.
Ten recent profile visitors instead of three. A free account sees the three most recent people who looked at your profile; Pro shows the ten most recent.

Nothing else is behind it. Posting, video, all three feeds, following, likes, comments, saves, collections, live broadcasting, live watching, encrypted messages, blocking, reporting, export and deletion are all free and unmetered, and cancelling Pro does not take away anything you have already posted or saved. There is no advertising in the feed on either tier.

What Foodies does not include

These are the features people most often assume are in a food app. None of them exists in Foodies:

Capabilities Foodies does not have, and the closest thing it does have
Not in the app	What exists instead
Restaurant discovery or a venue directory	Nothing. There are no venue records of any kind.
Restaurant reviews, ratings or rankings	Nothing is scored on Foodies. No stars, no scores, no “best of” lists.
Reservations or table bookings	Nothing. The app connects to no booking system.
A food map or map view	The Nearby feed, a list of posts from people around you, with coordinates snapped to roughly one kilometre.
Structured recipes with ingredients, steps, timings and servings	A post with a caption, written freely. The recipe guides cover technique in prose.
Shopping lists, meal planners or nutrition tracking	Named collections, which save posts for later but do not generate lists or counts.

This is worth being explicit about because a food app that quietly implies restaurant discovery is misdescribing itself, and because knowing what an app is not is how you decide quickly whether it is the one you want.

All of the above, free, on iPhone and iPad

Posting, all three feeds, live broadcasts, encrypted messages, collections and the safety tools cost nothing. Pro adds a badge and seven more profile visitors, and that is all it adds.

Download on the App Store Read the FAQ

Browse as a guest first if you would rather look before signing up.

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Everything Foodies actually does.