Frequently asked questions

A cooking app focused on regional recipes from around the world, with cultural context, authentic variants, and on-device dietary filtering. iOS-only for now.

Yes. During the beta every feature is free, with a fair-use limit of 15 AI uses a day. At launch we plan a Free tier that stays genuinely useful — full recipe catalog, dietary and health-condition filters, the medication food–drug interaction checker, hands-free cooking with bilingual voice commands, Live Activity timers and a few AI requests each week — plus an optional Sofrito Plus at $4.49/month or $34.99/year, with a 7-day free trial, for unlimited Chef Sofrito chat, more Pantry Chef dishes and imports, and cloud-vision Pantry Chef. No ads on either tier.

Plus is planned for launch: everything in Free, plus unlimited Chef Sofrito chat (fair use), up to 5 Pantry Chef dishes and 5 recipe imports a day, cloud-vision Pantry Chef, up to 3 AI pictures a day for your own recipes, unlimited saved recipes, and priority support. See the pricing section for the full split.

No. Sofrito works without sign-in. Favorites, history, your dietary profile, medications, timers, and achievements all live locally on your device. When Plus launches, Apple will handle the subscription — Apple is the merchant of record, and you'll be able to cancel anytime from iOS Settings → Apple ID → Subscriptions.

Yes. When Plus launches, Apple will handle billing, so you'll cancel from iOS Settings → Apple ID → Subscriptions → Sofrito → Cancel. Your access continues through the end of the period you've already paid for, then reverts to the Free tier.

iPhone with iOS 17 or later. It also runs on iPad, in an iPhone-sized window. Android isn't on the roadmap yet — we're keeping the team small and iOS-first to ship features quickly.

Only what's needed for the specific feature you tap: an AI question to the cooking assistant, the text of a recipe you import (never the photo), a pantry photo when Pantry Chef detects your ingredients, a medication list when you tap 'Check Interactions' on a recipe, a recipe submission when you contribute to the community catalog, or a report you send. The AI features ask first, name the AI companies involved (DeepSeek, Google Gemini, OpenAI and Anthropic), and can be turned off in Settings. Everything else stays local, including photos you add of dishes you cooked. Read the full privacy policy.

No. We don't have ad partners, no third-party analytics, no cross-app trackers. The backend logs are minimal and used only for rate limiting and debugging.

Only when you explicitly tap 'Check Interactions' on a recipe. Your medication list is sent once, together with that recipe's ingredients, to our proxy which forwards it to an AI model for analysis. Nothing is stored; the result is shown and forgotten. Medications are never logged with any identifier tied to you.

A mix of hand-curated regional recipes, AI-structured entries reviewed by us, and community submissions moderated before they appear. Every recipe includes an origin, history note, and ingredient list we can back up.

We aim for 'trusted home cook' authenticity: the canonical version a family in that region would actually make, plus well-known variants. Regional disputes (who 'owns' jollof, paella, etc.) are handled by surfacing the variants side by side with their cultural notes.

Yes — your own or your family's recipes. Photograph a handwritten card or your own notes on the Import screen, check the scanned text, then turn on 'Share with the Sofrito community' and confirm the recipe is yours or your family's and not copied from a cookbook, magazine, website or package. We review every submission before it can join the shared catalog. Recipes imported from websites stay in your personal collection, with a link back to the original.

Yes. Every import starts private — it lives on your device and can be exported as a PDF. Sharing is always your choice, and recipes imported from websites can't be shared at all.

Every recipe in the catalog is read whole by an AI model — its ingredients, its method, what is optional and what it is served with — and checked a second time against written rules for the FDA Big 9 allergens, vegan/vegetarian/pescatarian, no-pork and no-alcohol. A tag is shown only when both readings agree; when in doubt, we don't claim it. The tags describe the recipe itself. When a recipe fits your diet as long as you replace an optional ingredient or pick one of the choices it gives, we still show it, and mark that ingredient so you know exactly which one to watch. What a dish is served with — soy sauce with sushi, bread with a stew — is your choice at the table and is mentioned, not counted. Recipes you import yourself are checked on your device with the written rules alone. For severe allergies always cross-check the full ingredient list — cross-contamination during cooking is something no app can verify.

Not unless you ask. Every recipe is shown as it is traditionally made, and by default your filters show only the recipes that fit your diet as written. In My Diet you can turn on 'Also show recipes that fit with one change'. Then recipes that fit if you replace a single minor ingredient — a seasoning or a finishing touch, never what the dish is built on — appear too. They are marked as adapted, and the recipe marks the ingredient to replace. The recipe's text stays the original.

Conditions like hypertension, diabetes, renal insufficiency, and high cholesterol translate to food attributes (low-sodium, low-sugar, low-potassium + low-sodium + low-phosphorus, low-cholesterol). The app then only shows recipes that meet those attributes. We never claim a recipe is 'medically safe' for a condition — your clinician knows your targets, we don't.

Yes. The filters stack. A kosher + hypertension + peanut-allergy user sees only recipes that satisfy all three (no pork, no shellfish, low sodium, peanut-free).

When USDA data doesn't cover at least 75% of a recipe's weight and 85% of its calories, we don't show a nutrition card rather than make up numbers. Obscure or very regional ingredients sometimes fall outside USDA's dataset. When an ingredient we can't match would change a single value (a salty paste and the sodium, say), the card leaves that value out instead of guessing.

It's a recipe-aware AI chat. You can ask things like 'can I swap paprika for something else?' or 'is this freezable?' and it answers in the context of the specific recipe you're looking at.

A dish, an ingredient or a country, in English or Spanish — and also what kind of thing you want: a type of dish ('desserts', 'soups', 'empanadas'), what it's made with ('pork', 'seafood'), how it's cooked ('grilled', 'fried', 'steamed'), an occasion ('street food', 'Christmas'), or 'quick' and 'spicy'. Combine them with a country: 'desserts Peru', 'street food Mexico'. Each catalog recipe was read once by an AI model for these labels; the search itself runs on your phone. Recipes you import or create with Pantry Chef get the same labels in the one AI request that writes them, and keep them on your phone. The same search is in Discover, Regions, Seasonal and Saved.

In the days around a holiday the Seasonal tab shows its date, the countries celebrating it then, and the dishes traditionally cooked for it there. Every dish was linked to its holiday by hand. Holidays with no fixed dish — Mother's Day, Father's Day — have none, and the card says so and offers recipes from the country instead.

Tap 'Cook Now' on a recipe. The app reads steps aloud, listens for 'next', 'repeat', 'pause', and handles timers when a step has a duration. All speech recognition runs on-device. You pick the voice in Settings → Cooking voice.

Take a photo of what's on your counter. Sofrito spots the ingredients, lets you fix the list, then writes a recipe you can make with what you have — in the cuisine you choose. Cooked leftovers from a party? Turn on “These are leftovers” and it plans a new dish around them, reheated safely. By default the photo goes to our AI service only to detect the ingredients; turn on “Detect ingredients on-device only” in Settings to keep it on your iPhone.

Online grocery ordering is on the way — we're setting it up with grocery partners now. Today, your shopping list already converts recipe amounts into what you actually buy (a bunch of cilantro, a container of salt), and you can share it by text, WhatsApp or email in one tap.

Progress markers earned by doing things in the app: cooking a recipe to its last step, cooking ten different dishes, cooking a holiday dish, dishes from five regions, adding photos of what you cooked, bringing in a recipe of your own, asking Chef Sofrito, a first Pantry Chef recipe. A banner announces each one as you earn it, and a dot on Settings points to the new ones under Achievements. They're local to your device and don't require an account. Nothing is broadcast or shared.

Most recipe images are served from Cloudflare R2 and load quickly on a real device. If you're running an iOS simulator, you may see intermittent image failures due to a known simulator networking issue; images work normally on physical iPhones.

Check that microphone permission is granted in iOS Settings → Sofrito. Voice recognition runs fully on-device, so there's no network to troubleshoot. If the app says voice commands need on-device recognition, add a dictation language for the app's language in iOS Settings → General → Keyboard → Dictation Languages; any regional variety works (Spanish from Mexico, Spain or the U.S.). Otherwise it's usually a very noisy room.

The tag system errs conservative — we'd rather miss a tag than claim a wrong one. If you spot a recipe that's confidently mistagged, send a note via Support and we'll correct it.

Most data is local — deleting the app removes it. Community submissions and support messages stay in our database until you ask us to remove them. Email via the Support form with rough details (date + a few words) so we can find the entry.