A social network built for food, and nothing else.

What a social network for food lovers actually is

A social network for food lovers is one whose entire content type is food. Every post is a photo or a video of something somebody cooked or ate. Every profile belongs to someone who cares about that. Every feed, follow and comment stays inside the subject. Nothing on it is competing with dinner for your attention.

That sounds like a restriction, and it is the whole feature. On a general network your photo of a Tuesday ragù enters the same ranking pool as breaking news, an argument about politics and somebody's holiday. It loses, because food is quiet content and general ranking is tuned for loud content. Move the same photo into a network where everything is food and it gets judged against other food, which is the only fair comparison, and the only one you ever wanted.

Foodies is that network: a free app for iPhone and iPad, on iOS 17 or later, where home cooks and chefs post what they make. It has the parts you would expect from any social app, profiles, follows, likes, comments, direct messages, and a few that only make sense for food, like saving a dish into a named collection you will still understand in November, or broadcasting live from a hob while people cook the same thing along with you.

The graph: follows, and what the app does with them

Foodies uses a one-way follow rather than mutual friendship. You follow a cook because you want to see their food; they are under no obligation to follow you back, and nobody approves anything. That is the right shape for an interest network, a mutual-friendship graph is built around people you already know, which is a poor filter for cooking.

What the app does with that graph is deliberately legible. The Following feed is strictly chronological, the accounts you chose, in the order they posted, with nothing inserted. For You is ranked, and it reads your own behaviour: what you save, what you linger on, whose posts you open, which cuisines keep appearing in the things you like. Nearby is geographic. The guide to the three feeds explains how each one is put together and how to steer it.

Your profile carries a summary the app calls Food DNA: a plain-language read of the cuisines and dishes that dominate what you post, save and like. It is derived from your own activity rather than a questionnaire, which means it is occasionally unflattering and always more accurate than a bio.

The five things you can do with a post

There are exactly five, and knowing which one to use is most of the etiquette of the place.

• Like, applause. Cheap to give, pleasant to receive, forgotten in an hour.
• Comment, the only one that starts a conversation, and the one that actually builds a following. See how to comment on somebody's cooking.
• Save, intent. A save says I am going to cook this, which is a far stronger signal than a like and the one creators should be watching.
• Collect, filing a save into a named collection: "weeknights", "bread I have not managed yet", "for my mother's birthday".
• Send, passing the post into a private message, which is how most food actually travels between people who cook together.

Live cook-alongs

The feature that is hardest to get from a general social network is the live cook-along: you broadcast from your kitchen while it is happening, viewers comment in real time, and you can see how many people are in the room with you. It works because cooking is one of the few activities that is genuinely better unedited, the sauce that splits, the recovery, the moment you admit the pan is too small. Our guide to running a cook-along covers camera placement, the first sixty seconds, and what to do during a twelve-minute braise.

Private messages, encrypted end to end

Direct messages in Foodies are end-to-end encrypted. Each device generates an X25519 key pair; a shared secret is agreed per conversation, run through HKDF-SHA256, and used to encrypt every message with ChaCha20-Poly1305. The server stores and forwards ciphertext and routing metadata, and holds no key that would open it.

Two honest limits, because encryption claims should always come with them. There is no key-fingerprint verification screen yet, so you are trusting the server to hand you the right public key for the person you are messaging. And there is no forward secrecy: the conversation key is not ratcheted per message, so a device key compromised in the future could open messages captured in the past. This is meaningfully better than plaintext and meaningfully weaker than Signal, and you should know which one you are getting.

What Foodies deliberately is not

Foodies is not a restaurant guide. There are no venue listings, no restaurant reviews, no star ratings, no rankings and no bookings anywhere in the app, and none are planned as a side effect of anything described here. If what you want is somewhere to eat tonight, this is the wrong app, and we would rather say so on this page than waste your download.

Nearby is the part people most often expect to be a restaurant map, so it is worth being precise: it shows posts, not places. A post can carry an approximate coordinate, snapped to roughly a kilometre, and Nearby surfaces posts whose coordinates fall around you. "See what people are eating in your city" is an accurate description of it. "A map of restaurants near me" is not, and no amount of squinting will turn one into the other.

It is also not a structured recipe database. A recipe on Foodies is a post with a caption: there are no ingredient fields, no numbered steps, no prep-time or servings metadata, and no import from a recipe site. People write the method into the caption and it works well enough, but if you want technique explained properly the cooking guides on this site are written for that and are free to read without an account.

Starting without an account

You can browse as a guest. Open the app and the feed and grid are there to look at with no sign-up, no email and no interstitial. Signing in, with Apple, in one tap, is what unlocks posting, liking, commenting, saving and messaging, because all of those attach something to a person.

The app is fully translated into 34 languages, right-to-left scripts laid out properly rather than mirrored as an afterthought, with Dynamic Type and VoiceOver throughout. This website is English only for now.

Frequently asked questions

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