Clean food shouldn’t require a chemistry degree.

Who’s behind it

I’m Maddox Schmidlkofer — a software engineer who’s spent the last few years building and shipping consumer products. My last company, MaddoxCloud, was a cloud-gaming platform I built solo and sold at 21. I started another one, DuckMath, before that. Code is at github.com/maddox05.

Why I’m building this

After exiting in gaming I wanted to spend my time on something I actually cared about. The thing I kept coming back to was food. Every time I tried to figure out whether what I was eating was clean, I hit the same wall: ingredient labels in language a normal person can’t parse, restaurants that won’t tell you what oil they cook in, and “healthy” brands that quietly aren’t.

Most of the apps that exist today either grade everything by the same shallow rubric or get their data from the same manufacturer-supplied databases they’re supposed to be auditing. So Tallow does two things differently: it scores products on the things people who care about seed oils, ultra processing, and toxins actually care about — and it ties those scores back to independent lab tests we run ourselves whenever the label leaves room for doubt.

What you can expect

No ads, no third-party trackers, no data sold. If a score looks wrong to you, tell us — we review every report and a fix to the underlying data propagates to everyone’s next scan. The bar is to be the source you’d send your most skeptical friend to.

If you want to follow along or push back on something, the fastest way is email: support@tallow.app.