AI notice

1. What it does

Sugarhold explains which jobs sugar is doing in the recipe you supply, and how the result changes when some of it is removed. It divides the work into four — sweetness, holding water, colour and browning, and holding the structure up — shows how much of each that particular kind of bake is relying on, and shows how much of each is lost at the reduction you asked for. It tells you which one something else can carry, which ones nothing can, and where the loss is smallest if some of it has to go.

2. What the AI actually does, and what it does not

The weighting is not produced by a language model. The share each job takes comes from a fixed table of recipe types built into the service, and the arithmetic runs in your browser.

The model does one thing: it reads what you pasted and decides which kind of bake it is — a creamed sponge, a lean loaf, a meringue, and so on. It returns a category, never a number. Nothing with a figure attached comes from a model.

This matters because a model asked for numbers will produce numbers, and they will look exactly as convincing whether or not they mean anything. We would rather show you a weighting we can point at the source of.

3. It is not a measurement

What you get is how a bake of that general kind tends to behave. It is not a measurement of your bake, and it can be wrong about your recipe — particularly if your recipe is unusual, or has been classified as the wrong kind of thing. You can change the classification yourself if it has read it wrongly. Treat the reading as a well-informed expectation and use your own judgement.

4. It has nothing to do with health, nutrition or diet

This is the most important limit on this page. Sugarhold does not say whether reducing sugar is good or bad. It gives no calorie or intake figure. It covers nothing about blood sugar, metabolism, weight, teeth or any medical topic. It does not care why you want to reduce sugar — it only works out how the bake changes.

Where the service detects content of that kind it stops rather than answering, and gives this instead:

This only works out what happens to the bake. Anything to do with health, diet or nutrition is outside what it does — that belongs with a qualified professional, not with a baking tool.

Health questions belong with a qualified professional, not with a baking tool.

5. It makes no food safety or shelf-life judgement

Sugarhold describes changes in texture — that something is drier on the day, or firmer the next morning. It never addresses whether something is still safe to eat, how long it keeps, or whether it will spoil. Those are food safety questions, they are outside its scope, and it must not be relied on for them. Where it detects a question of that kind it skips that item and gives this instead:

Whether something keeps, and for how long, is a food safety question. This does not cover it and should not be relied on for it.

6. It outputs no recipe and no quantity or ratio

Not a gram, not a ratio, not a rewritten method. Your oven, your flour, your technique and the texture you are actually after are all unknown to it, and giving you a figure would be pretending otherwise. What it does instead is explain which category of ingredient can carry which job, and leave the doing to you.

7. Anything swapped in brings its own ingredients

Every reading the service produces carries this, without exception and regardless of what was asked:

Anything swapped in brings its own ingredients with it. Check what the people eating it can and cannot have before changing anything — this does not know, and does not assess allergies.

Sugarhold makes no assessment of allergies or intolerances, and it never will. It also names no brand and no specific product — only categories of ingredient.

8. No image uploads

There is no upload anywhere on this site, and no code path that could accept one. Judging a bake from a photograph of it is a judgement about food, and this service makes none. The recipe text you paste is the only input there is.

9. Your recipes are not training data

What you paste in is used to produce your reading and for nothing else. It is not used to train or improve any model, ours or a third party’s, and our contract with the AI provider forbids it. The privacy notice sets out how long anything is kept.

10. High-risk uses are not permitted

Sugarhold must not be used for, or as any part of, decisions in medicine, law, finance, safety, employment, credit, housing or justice. It is a tool for thinking about a domestic recipe. See the acceptable use policy.

11. Telling us it got something wrong

If a reading looks wrong to you, tell us. Which recipe, which classification, and what you expected — that is enough to look into it. The classification and the weighting table are both things we can correct.