Important Disclaimers
Last updated: July 30, 2026 · Please read this page before you cook from Stove Pals
Stove Pals is an organising tool, not an authority. It helps you keep recipes, plan a week, and build a shopping list. It does not verify that a recipe is safe, that a nutrition figure is correct, that an allergen has been identified, or that a cooking time will make food safe to eat. Everything in Stove Pals — whether you typed it, imported it, saved it from another user, or had AI generate it — is unverified. You use it entirely at your own risk.
This page collects the safety-critical parts of our Terms of Service in one place, in plain language. It summarises and supplements those Terms; it does not replace them, and the Terms govern in the event of any inconsistency. See in particular Section 14, Section 15, Section 16, Section 21, and Section 22.
Contents
1. AI can be confidently wrong
Stove Pals uses a third-party AI model (Google’s Gemini) to read recipes from photos and PDFs, to write recipes from a description, to guess a recipe from a photo of a plated dish, to identify items in a photo of your fridge, to estimate nutrition, and to estimate cost.
AI does not know things. It predicts plausible text. That means it can, and regularly does:
- omit an ingredient entirely, including an allergen;
- invent an ingredient, or state a quantity that is off by a large factor;
- give a cooking time or temperature that will leave food undercooked;
- misread handwriting, faded print, a curved page, or a low-light photo;
- produce nutrition figures that are not close to the real values; and
- do all of the above in a fluent, confident, authoritative tone.
The confidence of the output tells you nothing about its accuracy. A generated recipe that reads perfectly may still be wrong in a way that matters.
Some features are riskier than others. Extraction features (photo of a recipe card, PDF, link) read something you supplied, and errors are usually misreadings. Generation features — “Describe a Meal,” “Photo of a Dish,” “Estimate Calories,” nutrition estimation, price estimation — invent content that was never in your input. Treat their output as a starting draft, never as a reference.
AI output is not reviewed by a human, a chef, a nutritionist, or a food-safety professional before you see it.
2. Allergens
If you or anyone you are cooking for has a food allergy or intolerance, do not use Stove Pals to determine whether a dish is safe for them.
Treat the absence of an allergen warning as meaningless. Stove Pals does not maintain an allergen database and performs no allergen checking. Where allergen information appears at all, it was typed by a person or guessed by AI.
AI cannot detect:
- allergens hidden inside a compound ingredient — wheat in soy sauce, dairy in stock, nuts in a pesto, egg in a mayonnaise, fish in a Worcestershire sauce;
- allergens in the oils, coatings, thickeners, and seasonings that a recipe assumes but never lists;
- cross-contamination in a manufacturing facility, a restaurant kitchen, or your own kitchen;
- a specific brand’s formulation, which can change; or
- anything not visible in a photograph.
What to do instead: read the ingredient label on every product you actually use, every time; ask the person who prepared any dish you did not make yourself; and speak to an allergist or a registered dietitian about managing an allergy. If a reaction may be occurring, treat it as an emergency and contact emergency services.
3. Nutrition numbers are estimates
Calories, protein, carbohydrates, fat, and any custom nutrients shown in Stove Pals are estimates — produced by AI, drawn from generic ingredient data, or entered by you or another user. They are not laboratory-verified.
They do not account for:
- the specific brands and products in your kitchen;
- how much you actually served yourself, versus the nominal serving size;
- substitutions, omissions, and additions you made;
- fat absorbed or rendered during cooking, moisture lost, or liquid discarded; or
- natural variation between individual ingredients.
Real values will differ, sometimes by a great deal. Nutrition goals and tracking in Stove Pals are general-purpose organisational tools, not clinical ones. They are not calibrated to you, and they are not a diet plan or a recommendation.
4. Not medical or dietary advice
Stove Pals provides no medical, nutritional, dietary, or health advice, and nothing in it substitutes for a qualified professional. It is not a medical device and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease or condition.
Speak to a doctor or a registered dietitian before making significant dietary changes, and especially before doing so for a child, an older adult, someone who is pregnant or breastfeeding, or anyone managing diabetes, coeliac disease, kidney disease, an eating disorder, a heart condition, or any other condition affected by food.
Do not use calorie or nutrient tracking to manage a medical condition, and do not use it in a way that is harmful to you. If you are struggling with food, eating, or body image, please reach out to a healthcare professional or a support line in your country.
In an emergency — a suspected allergic reaction, anaphylaxis, or suspected food poisoning — stop using the app and contact emergency services or a poison control centre immediately. In the United States, Poison Control is 1-800-222-1222.
5. Cooking and food safety
You cook at your own risk. Stove Pals cannot see your kitchen, your appliances, your ingredients, or you. It is not supervising you, and it cannot tell whether something is done, safe, or about to catch fire.
Times and temperatures are indicative only. They are not calibrated to your oven, hob, air fryer, pressure cooker, altitude, cookware, or the actual size and starting temperature of your food. Use a food thermometer to confirm that meat, poultry, seafood, eggs, and reheated leftovers have reached a safe internal temperature.
You are responsible for safe food handling, including:
- washing hands and surfaces, and avoiding cross-contamination between raw and ready-to-eat foods;
- keeping cold food cold and hot food hot, and not leaving food in the temperature danger zone;
- thawing, storing, cooling, and reheating food safely, and observing use-by dates;
- discarding anything that may have spoiled; and
- handling knives, hot oil, gas, and electrical appliances safely, and keeping a working smoke alarm.
For authoritative guidance, consult your national food safety authority. In the United States, see foodsafety.gov.
The fridge and pantry features do not know what is safe. They track what you told them you have. They cannot judge freshness or spoilage. Never use them to decide whether something is still good.
Supervise children. Do not let anyone under the age of majority follow a recipe involving heat, sharp implements, or appliances without adult supervision.
6. Recipes from other users
Recipes in the public Discover feed are written and published by other users of Stove Pals. We do not test, verify, or endorse them. We do not check their ingredients, their cooking times, their nutrition figures, or their allergen information, and we do not know whether AI was involved in producing them.
Apply the same judgment you would to a recipe from a stranger on the internet, because that is what it is. If you find content that is unsafe or wrong, please use the Report control on the recipe.
If you publish to Discover, review your recipe first. Other people may cook it, and they have no way of knowing how it was made.
7. Imported recipes
When you import from a link, a photo, a PDF, or pasted text, Stove Pals reproduces what it read — including any errors in the original and any errors introduced in reading it. Formatting, quantities, and steps can be garbled, merged, or dropped. Always compare an imported recipe against its source before you cook from it.
You are also responsible for having the right to import the content. See Terms of Service, Section 12.
8. Price estimates
Grocery cost estimates are AI approximations. They are not quotes, are not tied to any retailer, and do not reflect your local prices, taxes, package sizes, promotions, or currency. Do not budget or make purchasing decisions based on them.
9. Availability and data loss
Stove Pals is provided “as is” and “as available.” We do not guarantee it will be uninterrupted or error-free, and AI features in particular depend on a third-party provider that may be slow, rate-limited, or unavailable.
Keep your own copies of anything you cannot afford to lose. Family recipes and other irreplaceable content should exist somewhere outside this Service. Deletion is generally permanent and cannot be undone.
10. What this means for you
In practice, before you cook from anything in Stove Pals:
- Read the whole recipe first and ask whether the ingredients, quantities, times, and temperatures make sense to you.
- Check anything AI produced against a source you trust.
- Read the labels on the products you actually use if allergies are involved — every time.
- Use a thermometer rather than a timer to decide when meat, poultry, seafood, and eggs are done.
- Trust your own senses and judgment over anything the app tells you. If something looks, smells, or feels wrong, it is wrong.
To the fullest extent permitted by law, Stove Pals is not liable for any illness, allergic reaction, injury, property damage, or loss arising from your use of the Service or your reliance on anything in it. The full terms of that limitation are in Section 22 of our Terms of Service.
11. Questions or concerns
If you have spotted something in Stove Pals that is unsafe, or you have a question about this page, please tell us at jrhq.net@gmail.com. We take safety reports seriously.