Terms of Use

Cook at Mine™ is a trading name of Lioness Kingdom Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales under company number 16650834, whose registered office is at 3rd Floor, 86–90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE, United Kingdom. In these Terms, “Cook At Mine”, “we” and “us” refer to Lioness Kingdom Ltd trading as Cook at Mine.

Cook At Mine is a connection platform only. We help independent Hosts find independent Cooks in their local area who can come to the Host’s home and prepare meals — meal prep — in the Host’s own kitchen, using the Host’s own ingredients. We are not a restaurant, a caterer, a food business, a food-delivery company, a meal-kit company, a private-chef agency, a recruitment agency, and we do not sell food.

Cooks are not employees, workers or agents of Cook At Mine. They are independent individuals who decide who they work with, what they charge and how they cook. Any meal prep arrangement is a direct agreement between the Host and the Cook. We are not a party to it, we do not supervise it and we do not take payment for it.

• You must be at least 18 years old to create an account.
• You must be legally able to enter into an agreement and use the platform in the UK.
• You must register with accurate, current and truthful information.
• One account per person. Host and Cook accounts are kept separate.
• You are responsible for keeping your password secure and for activity on your account.
• Tell us promptly if you believe someone else has accessed your account.

• Hosts and Cooks agree their own dishes, portions, dietary requirements, timing, rate and payment method directly.
• You are responsible for deciding whether a connection is suitable for you, including whether you are comfortable inviting someone into your home or entering someone's home.
• Cook At Mine does not guarantee that any Host or Cook is available, suitable, skilled, honest or safe.
• Cooks are responsible for their own tax, National Insurance and any insurance, registration or local-authority requirements that apply to them.
• Neither party should be treated as an employee of the other unless they agree that between themselves; that arrangement is their responsibility, not ours.

Where a booking is paid for through Cook At Mine, payment is taken when the booking is confirmed and the Cook’s payment is processed after the meal-prep session has been completed. Cancellations and refunds for those bookings follow the cancellation policy in section 3a. Anything the Host and Cook arrange outside a Cook At Mine booking remains between them.

• More than 24 hours before your booking: cancel for a full refund, including the Cook At Mine booking fee.
• Less than 24 hours before your booking: a £10 late-cancellation payment is made to your Cook for the time they reserved. The rest of your payment is refunded.
• If your Cook cancels, or does not attend: you receive a full refund of everything you paid.
• If the Cook is ready but cannot carry out the session because nobody is there or access isn't provided, the same £10 late-cancellation payment applies.
• Cook At Mine™ does not keep platform fees when a booking does not take place.
• If either side disagrees about what happened, no money is released automatically: the booking is placed on hold and our team decides the outcome.

The late-cancellation payment and the 24-hour window are set by Cook At Mine and may change. The amounts that apply to your booking are the ones shown when the booking is confirmed; later changes only affect future bookings.

Read the Safety and responsibilities page for what each side is expected to do.

This section applies specifically to Hosts. It sits alongside the rest of these Terms, which apply to everyone.

• Meal prep normally takes place in the Host's own domestic kitchen. As a Host, you provide the kitchen and are responsible for providing a reasonably safe, clean and suitable environment for the Cook, with equipment that is safe and working as agreed.
• You normally choose, purchase, own and provide the ingredients, and you control your own grocery budget. You are responsible for ingredients you supply being in date, properly stored and suitable for the agreed meals.
• You are responsible for giving the Cook accurate and complete dietary, allergy, intolerance, portion and storage information, clearly and in writing, before the arrangement.
• A Cook may only bring ingredients, seasonings or other items where this has been agreed with you in advance. Cook-brought items must be appropriately packaged and sealed where applicable, stored and transported in appropriate conditions, within their use-by or best-before date, and labelled with their original ingredient and allergen information where applicable. You may inspect any Cook-brought item on arrival and may decline its use.
• You and the Cook agree your meal prep arrangement directly. Cook At Mine provides the platform that facilitates the connection — it does not itself provide the cooking service, and it is not a party to your arrangement.

This section applies specifically to Cooks. It sits alongside the rest of these Terms, which apply to everyone.

• Cooks use Cook At Mine as independent service providers, offering meal prep in the Host's kitchen with the Host's ingredients. You are a user of the platform, not an employee, worker, contractor or agent of Cook At Mine or Lioness Kingdom Ltd.
• Cook At Mine does not guarantee you any work, bookings, earnings, level of demand or minimum hours. Whether you receive requests depends on Hosts in your area and the choices they make.
• You choose which opportunities to accept or decline. Each meal prep arrangement is agreed individually and directly between you and the Host — including dishes, portions, timing, rate and payment — and Cook At Mine is not a party to it.
• You must comply with applicable food-safety, hygiene and allergen responsibilities: good personal hygiene, safe food-handling practice throughout the arrangement, safe cooling, storing and labelling of prepared meals, and carefully following the dietary and allergy requirements the Host has communicated.
• You may only bring ingredients, seasonings or other items to a Host's home where this has been agreed with the Host in advance. Any such items must be appropriately packaged and sealed where applicable, stored and transported in appropriate conditions, within their use-by or best-before date, and labelled with their original ingredient and allergen information where applicable. The Host may inspect and decline any Cook-brought item on arrival.
• You must provide truthful information for your profile and for any identity or verification checks we ask for, and behave appropriately and respectfully when entering a Host's home.
• You are responsible for determining your own tax status and for complying with any HMRC requirements that apply to you.
• Where applicable, this includes registering with HMRC (for example as self-employed), keeping appropriate records of your income and expenses, declaring your taxable income through Self Assessment, and paying your own Income Tax and National Insurance contributions.
• Cook At Mine does not deduct tax or National Insurance from anything you earn and does not pay your personal taxes on your behalf. Money a Host pays you is paid directly to you, and the tax treatment of it is your responsibility.
• Cook At Mine does not provide individual tax, accounting or employment-status advice. If you are unsure of your position, check the guidance on GOV.UK or speak to HMRC or a qualified adviser.

Nothing in these Terms, by itself, determines your legal employment or tax status. That status depends on the reality of each working relationship and is assessed under applicable law and HMRC guidance, not just contractual wording.

• Profile information, photos, cuisines, specialities, rates and experience must be truthful and describe you.
• Only upload food photographs of dishes you personally prepared, and only upload photos you have the right to use.
• Do not claim qualifications, certifications or checks you do not hold.
• Reviews and ratings must be genuine and based on a real arrangement. Fake, paid, retaliatory or coerced reviews are not allowed.
• You keep ownership of the content you upload and grant us a licence to host and display it on the platform so it can be shown to other users.

You must not:

• Harass, bully, threaten or intimidate another user.
• Discriminate against anyone, including on the basis of race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender reassignment, disability, age, pregnancy, marital status or nationality.
• Impersonate anyone, create a fraudulent profile, or use the platform to defraud or scam another user.
• Move conversations off the platform in order to avoid our safety protections, or press another user for personal contact details before they are comfortable.
• Misuse another user's personal information, share it publicly, or use it for marketing.
• Use the platform for anything illegal, or to arrange anything illegal.
• Scrape, copy, reverse-engineer, overload or interfere with the platform or its security features.

• You can report another user, a message, a review or a profile from within the platform. Reports go to our team and are treated confidentially.
• You can block another user to stop further direct communication.
• We may warn, restrict, suspend or remove an account where we reasonably believe these Terms or our Community Standards have been broken, where behaviour puts someone at risk, or where we are required to do so by law.
• Where it is reasonable and lawful to do so, we will tell you why and give you the chance to respond.
• You can close your account at any time from your account area or by contacting us.

Cooks must complete identity verification before their profile can appear publicly in Browse Cooks or search results. Cooks may also choose to submit optional professional credentials — Level 2 Food Hygiene & Safety training and Public Liability Insurance. We review the evidence supplied before any verification or credential badge is displayed, and Cooks are responsible for keeping the information they submit accurate and current, including renewing anything that expires. An expired optional credential simply removes that badge until renewed evidence is approved.

A verification or credential badge means we have seen the evidence supplied at that time. It is not a background check, a qualification check, a food-hygiene check, or a guarantee about anyone’s behaviour, cooking or safety. You must still make your own judgement about who you connect with. Verification documents are never shown publicly — see our Privacy Policy.

Access is currently free for our founding accounts. If we introduce charges for platform access we will tell you in advance and you can choose whether to continue. We do not take payment for meal prep arrangements — those are settled directly between the Host and the Cook.

We aim to keep Cook At Mine available, but we do not promise it will be uninterrupted or error-free. We may change, suspend or withdraw features, and we may carry out maintenance. Cook At Mine is not an emergency service and messages are not monitored in real time.

The Cook At Mine name, logo, design, text and software are owned by us or our licensors and may not be copied or used without permission. Your own content remains yours, subject to the licence in section 6.

Nothing in these Terms limits or excludes our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that cannot be limited or excluded under UK law. If you are a consumer, you keep all your statutory rights, including under the Consumer Rights Act 2015.

Subject to that: because we only provide the connection service, we are not responsible for the acts, omissions, conduct, food, hygiene, honesty, timekeeping or quality of any Host or Cook, for the content users post, or for any agreement reached between users. We are not liable for loss that was not reasonably foreseeable when you started using the platform.

We may update these Terms as the platform develops or the law changes. We will post the updated version here with a new date and, where the change is significant, tell you in-app or by email. Continuing to use Cook At Mine after that means you accept the updated Terms.

These Terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have non-exclusive jurisdiction. If you are a consumer living elsewhere in the UK, you can also bring proceedings in your home courts.

Questions about these Terms? See our contact page.