Tallow started because my girlfriend Maria and I stopped going out to eat.
Not because we didn't want to — we did. We missed it. But every time we tried, we'd come home feeling worse than when we left, and the math kept getting harder to ignore: the cheap industrial oils most American restaurants cook in — soybean, canola, sunflower, "vegetable" — were not on the menu, not on the receipt, and not on the label of the bottle they came out of.
You couldn't see them. So you couldn't avoid them. So we stopped going.
We wanted something better. Not a lecture, not a diet — just a way to know which places we could walk into without playing roulette with the fryer. That's what Tallow is.
The gap on the shelf
Apps like Yuka and Open Food Facts do a great job on packaged groceries. They scan a barcode, parse the ingredient list, and hand back a score. That works because the manufacturer is legally required to print the ingredients on the package.
Restaurants have no such obligation. A bowl of fries is just "fries." A salad dressing is just "house vinaigrette." The cooking medium — usually the largest single contributor to the dish's fat profile — is invisible to the diner.
So we built a tool to make it visible.
What we actually do
Tallow rates two things:
- Restaurants — we maintain an opinionated list of every chain and independent restaurant we've been able to verify, scored by which oils they cook in, what their fryer policy is, and whether they substitute on request.
- Packaged groceries — we scan the barcode like every other ingredient app does, but we surface what we actually care about: seed oils, NOVA classification (ultra-processed?), known endocrine disruptors, and PFAS where lab data exists.
We don't sell your scan history. We don't sell ads. The whole company is funded by the people who use it.
Lab data, not just label parsing
For the products that matter most — the ones at the bottom of the trust chain, where the label says "all natural" and you have no way to verify — we send samples to an accredited lab and publish the results. PFAS, microplastics, glyphosate residue. If we say a product passed, it's because a third party measured it.
The goal isn't to scare you off food. It's to make the invisible part of the supply chain visible enough that you can choose.
What's next
We're publishing on this blog when:
- A restaurant changes its cooking oil (good or bad)
- A lab batch comes back with results worth knowing about
- We ship a meaningful change to the scanner
- Somebody asks us a question that more than three people would care about
If you have a request — a chain we haven't rated yet, a packaged product you want lab-tested, a feature you wish the app had — email us at support@tallow.app. We read everything.
Eat clean. Drink clean.