Privacy Policy

Summary

• Who we serve. Hyphen sells to businesses. Most personal information we handle is business contact information about people who work for our customers, prospects, partners, and suppliers.
• What we collect. Contact and business details you give us, information about how you use our website, and business contact information from business data providers and partners.
• What we do not do. We do not sell personal information. We do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising. We do not use personal information, including personal information we process for our customers, to train artificial intelligence or machine learning models. Our Equipment does not currently capture images, video, audio, or biometric identifiers.
• Customer data. When we process information on behalf of a restaurant or foodservice customer — such as guest order details, or the accounts and activity of the customer's staff in our software — we act as that customer's service provider. That customer's privacy notice governs that information.
• Your choices. You can unsubscribe from marketing emails, manage cookies, and ask us to access, correct, or delete your personal information. Email privacy@usehyphen.com.

1. Scope of This Policy

1.1 What this Policy covers. This Policy applies to personal information that Hyphen collects for its own purposes through:

• our websites, including usehyphen.com, that link to this Policy (the "Site");
• the contact details of customer administrators and billing contacts that we use to manage our customer relationships, and information we collect when you contact us for support;
• our sales, marketing, events, demonstrations, and site visits;
• our dealings with partners, suppliers, and investors; and
• job applications submitted to Hyphen.

1.2 What this Policy does not cover.

• Data we process for our customers. Our customers, such as restaurants and foodservice operators, use our software and online services, including CulinaryOS, our mobile and tablet applications, and the software on our Equipment (the "Services"), to manage menus, recipes, orders, and operations. When we process personal information on a customer's behalf, we act as that customer's service provider or processor. Examples include: a guest's name, order details, and dietary or allergen notes received from the customer's ordering or point-of-sale system so that the order can be prepared and labeled; the accounts of the customer's staff and their logins and actions in the Services and on the Equipment; and video footage a customer provides to us for an operational study. The customer's privacy notice governs that information, and our contract with the customer limits how we may use it. If you are a guest or employee of one of our customers and have a privacy question or request about that information, please contact that customer directly. If you contact us, we will refer your request to the customer and help the customer respond.
• Hyphen personnel. This Policy does not cover personal information about Hyphen's employees and contractors.
• Third-party sites and services. This Policy does not cover websites, apps, or services that Hyphen does not operate, even if we link to them.

2. Personal Information We Collect

2.1 Information you give us.

• Contact and inquiry information. When you request a demo, reserve a Makeline, fill out a form, or contact us, we collect information such as your name, email address, phone number, job title or role, company name and website, business type and foodservice vertical, location, number of sites, meal volumes, menu or cuisine type, business challenges, and anything else you choose to tell us.
• Customer, billing, and transaction information. For customers and prospective customers, we collect the information needed to quote, sell, finance, deliver, install, and support our products, such as administrator and billing contact names and details, billing and shipping addresses, purchase orders, and payment and invoicing records. If you pay by card, our payment processors handle your card details; we do not store full payment card numbers.
• Support and communications. When you contact us for support, communicate with us by email, phone, video meeting, text message, or chat, or provide feedback, we collect the content of those communications and related details.
• Calls and meetings. With notice and any consent the law requires, we may record, transcribe, or summarize calls and video meetings using third-party tools, to keep accurate records, follow up on commitments, and improve our service.
• Events and surveys. When you attend a Hyphen event, visit our facility, meet us at a trade show, or answer a survey, we collect information such as your name, contact details, company, and responses.
• Job applications. When you apply for a job, we collect the information you provide, such as your résumé, work history, education, references, work eligibility, compensation expectations, and answers to application questions. Voluntary equal-opportunity information, such as gender, race, ethnicity, veteran status, or disability status, is optional. If you provide it, we use it only for reporting and equal-opportunity compliance, and we do not use it in hiring decisions.

2.2 Information we collect automatically.

• Site usage information. When you visit the Site, we and our service providers automatically collect information such as your IP address, browser and device type, operating system, referring web page, pages viewed, time spent, links clicked, and the date and time of your visit. We may infer your approximate location (such as city, region, or country) and your company from your IP address. We do not collect precise geolocation through the Site.
• Email engagement. Our marketing and sales emails may contain technologies that tell us whether an email was opened and whether links in it were clicked.
• Services and Equipment data. Our Services and Equipment generate technical and operational data, such as sensor and dispense readings, faults, uptime, software versions, device identifiers, and logs. This data is mostly about the Equipment and how it runs. When it is linked to a user — for example, when a user signs in or takes an action on the Equipment — we process that personal information on behalf of our customer, as described in Section 1.2.

Section 6 describes the cookies and similar technologies we use.

2.3 Information we receive from others.

• Business information providers. We obtain business contact information — such as names, job titles, employers, work email addresses, work phone numbers, and professional profiles — from commercially available business databases, data enrichment providers, and public sources, such as company websites and professional networking sites, to identify and contact businesses that may be interested in our products.
• Partners and referrals. We may receive information about you from channel partners, distributors, foodservice management companies, equipment financing partners, integration partners, event organizers, and people who refer you to us.
• Website analytics and sales-intelligence providers. Our analytics providers tell us how visitors use our Site. Until November 2026, our sales-intelligence providers also identified visiting companies, and a visitor-identification provider identified some individual U.S. visitors to our Site by name and professional profile (see Section 6.1).
• Recruiting sources. If you apply for a job, we may receive information from recruiters, job boards, references, and, where permitted and with any required consent, background-check providers.

2.4 Sensitive personal information. For our own purposes, we collect sensitive personal information only from job applicants, such as optional demographic information and information needed to verify work eligibility. We use sensitive personal information only for purposes the law permits without offering a right to limit its use, and we do not use it to infer characteristics about you. We do not seek to collect consumer health data for our own purposes. Order details we process for customers may include dietary or allergen preferences; we process them only as the customer's service provider or processor.

3. How We Use Personal Information

We use personal information to:

• Respond and sell. Respond to inquiries; schedule demos and site visits; prepare quotes and proposals; evaluate whether our products fit your operation; and enter into and perform agreements with customers, partners, and suppliers.
• Serve our customers. Manage customer accounts and relationships; deliver installation, training, maintenance, and support; and send service, security, and administrative messages.
• Improve our products. Understand how the Site is used; diagnose and fix problems; measure performance; and develop new products and features. Where practicable, we use aggregated or de-identified information for these purposes.
• Market. Send marketing emails and other communications about Hyphen products, events, and news that may interest your business; personalize our outreach; and measure the effectiveness of our marketing. You may opt out at any time (see Section 8.1).
• Keep things secure. Protect the security and integrity of our Site, Services, Equipment, and systems; detect and prevent fraud, abuse, and security incidents; and protect the rights, property, and safety of Hyphen, our customers, and others.
• Run our business. Manage finances, accounting, billing, equipment financing, audits, and insurance; manage our relationships with partners and suppliers; and plan and carry out corporate transactions.
• Recruit. Evaluate applicants, communicate with them, verify information, and comply with employment laws.
• Meet legal obligations. Comply with laws, regulations, legal process, and government requests; enforce our agreements; and establish, exercise, or defend legal claims.
• With your consent. Use personal information for other purposes we describe to you when we collect it, or with your consent.

De-identified information. When we de-identify information, we maintain it in de-identified form, do not attempt to re-identify it except as the law permits, and contractually require recipients not to re-identify it.

Artificial intelligence. We do not use personal information, including personal information we process for our customers, to train artificial intelligence or machine learning models. We use AI-enabled tools provided by our service providers to help us work — for example, to draft documents and summarize meetings. Where available, we choose settings or plans under which these providers do not use our information to train their models.

4. How We Disclose Personal Information

We disclose personal information only as described below.

• Service providers. We use service providers to help us operate our business, such as providers of cloud hosting, software and website hosting, online forms, analytics, customer relationship management and sales tools, email and communications, meeting recording and transcription, AI-enabled productivity tools, customer support, recruiting, payments and accounting, and IT and security. We require our service providers, by contract, to use personal information only to provide services to us, except for limited purposes their terms allow, such as security and improving their own services where the law permits.
• Business partners, at your organization's direction or to complete a transaction. We disclose information to partners as needed to sell, finance, deliver, install, integrate, or service our products — for example, to equipment financing and leasing partners, foodservice management companies, distributors, installation and service contractors, and providers of point-of-sale, ordering, and other systems that your organization connects to the Services.
• Professional advisors. We disclose information to our lawyers, accountants, auditors, insurers, and other advisors as needed for their services.
• Investors and acquirers. We may disclose information to actual or prospective investors, lenders, acquirers, or successors, and their advisors, in connection with a financing, merger, acquisition, reorganization, sale of assets, bankruptcy, or similar transaction, subject to confidentiality obligations. If a transaction occurs, personal information may transfer to the successor.
• Legal and safety. We disclose information when we believe in good faith that disclosure is needed to comply with law, regulation, legal process, or a government request; to enforce our agreements; or to protect the rights, property, or safety of Hyphen, our customers, or others.
• With your consent or at your direction. We disclose information when you ask us to or consent to it.

We may disclose aggregated or de-identified information that does not identify you for any lawful purpose.

No sale; no sharing for targeted advertising. We do not sell personal information, and we do not share personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising, as those terms are defined under California law. We have no actual knowledge of selling or sharing the personal information of anyone under 16. We do not disclose personal information to third parties for their own direct marketing purposes. Until November 2026, our Site used RB2B, a visitor-identification service that matched some U.S. visitors' browser, device, and IP information to their names and professional profiles under RB2B's own terms. We have removed RB2B from the Site.

5. Categories of Personal Information: Collection and Disclosure Over the Past 12 Months

This table summarizes, using categories defined by California law, the personal information we have collected for our own purposes in the past 12 months, its sources, our main purposes, and the categories of recipients to whom we disclosed it for a business purpose. Section 3 describes our purposes in detail. We may also disclose each category to professional advisors and as legally required (Section 4).

6. Cookies and Similar Technologies

6.1 What we use. The Site uses cookies, pixels, scripts, and similar technologies, some placed by our service providers, for these purposes:

• Strictly necessary. To operate and secure the Site and remember your preferences. You cannot turn these off through our Site.
• Analytics. To understand how visitors use the Site and to improve it. We use Google Analytics. To learn how Google uses data, visit https://policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites. To opt out of Google Analytics, use the browser add-on at https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout.
• Former visitor-identification tools. Until November 2026, we used a visitor-identification integration provided by Lemlist to understand which companies were visiting our Site. That integration also loaded RB2B, which identified some individual U.S. visitors (see Section 4). We have removed this integration from the Site.
• Embedded tools. Forms, scheduling tools, videos, and job-application pages embedded on the Site may set their own cookies.

We do not use advertising cookies or pixels on the Site, and we do not use session-replay tools that record what you type.

6.2 Your choices. Most browsers let you block or delete cookies. Blocking cookies may affect how the Site works. You can also use the Google Analytics opt-out add-on described above.

6.3 Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control. Some browsers send "Do Not Track" signals. Because there is no common standard for how to interpret them, the Site does not respond to Do Not Track signals. If your browser sends a Global Privacy Control ("GPC") signal, we treat it as a valid request to opt out of the sale and sharing of personal information associated with that browser, as applicable law requires. As stated in Section 4, we do not sell or share personal information.

6.4 Third-party tracking. The providers described in Section 6.1, including Google, may collect information about your online activities over time and across different websites when you use the Site. We do not knowingly allow other third parties to do so.

7. How Long We Keep Personal Information

We keep personal information only as long as reasonably necessary for the purposes described in this Policy, unless the law requires or permits a longer period. To set retention periods, we consider the amount, nature, and sensitivity of the information, the purposes for which we use it, the risk of harm from unauthorized use or disclosure, and our legal, accounting, and contractual obligations. In general:

8. Your Choices and Rights

8.1 Marketing emails. You can unsubscribe from marketing emails at any time by using the unsubscribe link in the email or by emailing privacy@usehyphen.com. We process unsubscribe requests within 10 business days. We will still send you transactional and service messages, such as account, security, and contract notices.

8.2 Access, correction, and deletion for everyone. Wherever you live, you may ask us for a copy of the personal information we hold about you, or ask us to correct or delete it. We will consider and respond to every request, and will honor it where the law requires or where we reasonably can — for example, unless we need the information to complete a transaction, meet a legal obligation, maintain security, or establish or defend legal claims.

8.3 Additional rights under U.S. state privacy laws. Depending on where you live, you may have some or all of these rights, subject to exceptions under applicable law:

• Right to know and access. To know what personal information we have collected about you, including the categories of information, sources, purposes, and recipients, and to obtain a copy of the specific pieces of information, in a portable format where required.
• Right to delete. To ask us to delete personal information we collected from you.
• Right to correct. To ask us to correct inaccurate personal information.
• Right to opt out. To opt out of the sale or sharing of your personal information, targeted advertising, and certain profiling. We do not sell or share personal information, engage in targeted advertising, or engage in profiling that produces legal or similarly significant effects.
• Right to limit use of sensitive personal information. We use sensitive personal information only for purposes that do not require us to offer this right.
• Rights about automated decision-making. We do not use automated decision-making technology to make significant decisions about you.
• Right to non-discrimination and non-retaliation. We will not discriminate or retaliate against you for exercising your rights.
• Right to appeal. If we decline to act on your request, you may appeal our decision by replying to our response or by emailing privacy@usehyphen.com with the subject line "Privacy Request Appeal." We will respond to your appeal within the time the law requires. If you are not satisfied with our response, you may contact your state attorney general.

8.4 How to submit a request. Email privacy@usehyphen.com or write to us at Hyphen Technologies, Inc., Attn: Privacy, 276 E. Gish Road, San Jose, CA 95112. Please describe your request and tell us which state you live in.

• Verification. To protect your information, we will ask you to verify your identity before we fulfill a request to know, access, correct, or delete. Usually we do this by matching information you provide with information we already have, such as by confirming access to the email address we have on file. We will use the information you provide for verification only to verify your request.
• Authorized agents. You may use an authorized agent to submit a request. We may ask the agent for signed proof of authority and may ask you to verify your identity directly, unless the agent holds a valid power of attorney.
• Timing. Where a state privacy law applies to your request, we will confirm receipt and respond within the time that law requires — under California law, confirmation within 10 business days and a response within 45 days, which we may extend once by up to 45 more days if we tell you why.
• Requests about customer data. If your request concerns information we process on behalf of one of our customers (Section 1.2), we will refer you to that customer and help the customer respond, as our contract with the customer requires.

8.5 California "Shine the Light." California residents may ask us whether we have disclosed their personal information to third parties for those third parties' direct marketing purposes. We do not make those disclosures.

9. How We Protect Personal Information

We use administrative, technical, and physical safeguards designed to protect personal information, such as encryption of data in transit over public networks and, for data stored in our cloud environment, at rest; role-based access controls; multi-factor authentication for internal systems where practicable; and logging. No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, so we cannot guarantee absolute security. If you believe your information or account has been compromised, contact us immediately at privacy@usehyphen.com.

10. Children

The Site and the Services are intended for businesses and are not directed to children under 13. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 16. If you believe a child has provided us personal information, contact privacy@usehyphen.com, and we will delete it.

11. Information About Our Equipment

Our Makelines are connected devices. They send technical and operational data to Hyphen so that we can support, maintain, secure, and improve them, as our customer agreements describe. Our Equipment does not currently capture images, video, audio, or biometric identifiers. When a customer provides video footage to us for an operational study, we process it as the customer's service provider, without facial recognition or identification of individuals. If we introduce an Equipment feature that would collect images, video, audio, or biometric identifiers, we will update this Policy and work with our customers to provide any notices and obtain any consents the law requires before collection begins.

12. People Outside the United States

Hyphen is based in the United States, and we process and store information in the United States. If you access the Site or communicate with us from outside the United States, your information will be transferred to, processed, and stored in the United States, where data protection laws may differ from those in your country. If the law of your country gives you rights over your personal information, contact privacy@usehyphen.com, and we will respond as that law requires. Where the law requires a legal basis for processing, we rely on: our legitimate interests in operating, marketing, and improving our business and the Site; the performance of a contract with you or your organization; compliance with legal obligations; and, where required, your consent, which you may withdraw at any time.

13. Changes to This Policy

We may update this Policy from time to time. When we do, we will post the updated Policy on the Site and change the "Last Updated" date above. If we make material changes, we will provide additional notice, such as a notice on the Site or an email to customers' account administrators, before the changes take effect. Where the law requires your consent to a change, we will ask for it.

14. Contact Us

If you have questions about this Policy or our privacy practices, or want to exercise your rights, contact us:

Hyphen Technologies, Inc., Attn: Privacy, 276 E. Gish Road, San Jose, CA 95112

• Phone: (408) 475-1880
• Email: privacy@usehyphen.com

If you have a disability and need this Policy in another format, email privacy@usehyphen.com.