Affiliate Disclosure

Palatis earns money in two ways: subscriptions, and commissions when you send a grocery basket to a partner. This page explains the second one in full, because a tool that recommends what to buy has to be honest about who pays it.

The disclosure, plainly

When you use the grocery hand-off and complete a purchase with a partner such as Freshcart, Mercato Nove, Copperpot, Bloom and Bushel, The Salt Room, Umamiya, Verdant Grocer, Chez Lumiere, Kettle and Co, Nomad Pantry or Harvest Loop, that partner may pay Palatis a commission on the order. It costs you nothing extra: the price you pay is the partner's normal price, and we do not receive a share of a markup created for us.

Commission is typically a small percentage of the basket, sometimes a flat fee per first order. It is paid on the whole basket, not on individual products, which matters: we have no financial reason to prefer one brand of miso over another.

What money cannot buy

• Ranking. Partner order in the hand-off screen is set by delivery coverage at your postcode, stock reliability and the price of your basket. Commission rate is not an input. It is not a tie-breaker either.
• Builds. No partner or manufacturer pays to appear in a meal build, in the flavor coach, or in a swap suggestion. There is no sponsored recipe on Palatis and there never has been.
• Ingredients. Nobody pays us to put an ingredient in your list. If a build calls for gochujang it is because the build needs gochujang.
• Chef notes. Partner chefs are paid a flat licence fee for their technique notes. They are not paid per mention, per product or per basket, and they can veto a build without asking us.
• Reviews. We do not publish paid comparisons, and we do not accept payment to remove a partner from a comparison.

How a partner gets in

We check four things before we integrate a grocer, in this order:

• Substitution honesty. Does the partner tell the customer before swapping an item, or after? Partners who silently substitute do not get in.
• Ingredient data quality. We need a real ingredient list per product, kept current, so allergen flags mean something.
• Coverage and reliability. Delivery windows they actually hit, in cities where our cooks live.
• Data hygiene. A written agreement that the basket is used to fulfil the order and nothing else — no profiling, no resale, no marketing list.

Commercial terms are negotiated last, after those four are settled, and a partner who fails one of them is not rescued by a better rate. We remove partners too: repeated substitution complaints, stale ingredient data or a data-handling breach ends the integration, and we say so on this page when it happens.

What a partner learns about you

Only the basket you approved, plus the delivery details you enter on their side. Not your palate profile, not your allergens, not your macro targets, not your build history. We do not sell audience data to grocers, and we do not let them advertise to you inside Palatis.

Other revenue, for completeness

• Subscriptions. Pro and Table. This is the majority of our revenue and we would like to keep it that way, because it is the version of this business with the fewest conflicts.
• Partner kitchen licences. Restaurants and meal-kit kitchens pay to use the palate model with their own customers. They do not receive your data, and their builds do not appear in your app unless you follow that kitchen.
• Nothing else. We do not sell advertising, we do not sell data, and we do not take payment for editorial placement in the journal.

Where you will see this said again

The hand-off screen carries a one-line notice — we may earn a commission on this order — every time, not once at signup. Journal articles that link to a partner carry the same notice at the top of the article, above the first link, not in a footer. Emails that contain a partner link say so before the link.

The legal framing

This disclosure is written to satisfy the United States Federal Trade Commission Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising, 16 CFR Part 255, which require a clear and conspicuous statement of a material connection. It is also written for the European Union Unfair Commercial Practices Directive as amended by the Omnibus Directive, which requires paid or commission-influenced ranking to be disclosed and prohibits presenting a paid placement as an organic result. Because commission does not influence our ranking at all, our disclosure says exactly that rather than describing a ranking parameter we do not use.

Testimonials on our site come from real cooks describing their own experience. Nobody is paid for a quote; contributors sometimes receive a free Pro year, and where that is the case the quote says so.

Questions and challenges

If a recommendation ever looks bought, tell us and we will explain exactly why it appeared, or fix it. Write to [email protected]. Press questions about partner terms go to [email protected], and we answer them on the record.