Questions parents actually ask

Food Replay is a nutrition and fitness app for children aged 5–13 that turns healthy eating into a hero's journey. Kids log meals with a camera, fill five nutrient powers, earn Sparks and unlock arcade games and comic stories, while parents follow real habits from their own dashboard.

Food Replay is designed for children aged 5 to 13, with goals and targets fitted to age bands so a 5-year-old and a 13-year-old each get appropriate expectations. Parents of any age run the account; younger siblings can join when they turn five.

Food Replay is free to download and free to try on both iOS and Android. One family subscription unlocks every world, game and comic for all children on the account. There are no ads and no in-app purchases aimed at children — Sparks can never be bought.

Food Replay runs on iPhone and iPad (iOS 16 or later) and on Android phones and tablets (Android 10 or later). The tablet layouts are designed from scratch, not stretched — iPad and Android tablets get a landscape navigation rail, a side-by-side panel layout for browsing and reading comics, and a dual-pane parent dashboard. The same account works across all your devices.

About five minutes. A parent creates the account, sets a PIN and answers a short interview about goals; then the child takes over for the fun part — designing their look-alike hero in the hero studio. Most families log their first meal the same evening.

Yes — Food Replay is built for whole families. Each child gets their own profile, hero, goals and streaks under one parent account and one subscription. Profile switching is protected by a grown-up lock so kids stay on their own side.

No. Many families run Food Replay on a shared family tablet or a parent's phone. Profile switching takes seconds, and the grown-up lock keeps children out of settings and other profiles.

With one tap: the Log button opens a camera, the child points it at the plate, and Food Replay reads the meal. If the app isn't sure, it asks in kid language with big yes/no buttons. Kids can also tell Nova what they ate by voice. There's no typing and no portion math on the kid side.

Each nutrient owns a power with its own colour and shape: protein is Muscle Power, water is Splash Power, fiber is Tummy Power, healthy fat is Brain Power and vitamins are Spark Power. Meals fill the powers like glasses through the day — no calories or grams are ever shown to children.

Not at children, ever. The kid experience shows powers filling, never numbers — no calories, no grams, no percentages. Parents see plain-language trends (like 'fiber up 12% this week') on their own dashboard, written about the child, never addressed to the child.

The streak pauses — it never breaks. Food Replay has no streak-loss warnings and no penalty for missed days; tomorrow the streak simply continues where it left off. Nothing earned is ever lost, because dread is a terrible reason for a child to eat lunch.

Sparks are Food Replay's in-app currency, earned by logging meals and activity. They're spent only inside arcade games, on stages and hero gear. Three rules make them trustworthy: Sparks are never bought with money, never expire, and cannot be removed — not even by a parent.

Because the moment food rewards can be confiscated as punishment, food becomes a battlefield. Food Replay separates the two: parents control when games are played (play windows and time caps), but everything a child has earned by eating well stays earned, permanently.

Treats are logged honestly and treated matter-of-factly — honest logging is actually rewarded, because an accurate picture matters more than a perfect one. Food Replay never labels foods 'bad' and never scolds; teaching a child to hide food from a tracker teaches them to hide food from you.

Some will try — they're kids. Food Replay's honesty mechanics reward truthful logging over volume, parents can see logs on their dashboard, and because Sparks buy fun rather than escape anything, the incentive to fake logs is low. A conversation plus the shared family goal usually settles it.

Yes — the Move side lets kids log play and activity alongside meals, feeding the same streaks and Sparks. It's deliberately simple: movement is celebrated as energy for the hero, not measured in burned calories.

Parents cap play time, not earning. You set arcade windows and daily minute caps; when the cap is reached the app winds down warmly, suggesting the comic or tomorrow's quest. Logging meals is never blocked, evenings shift into a dim nightlight mode, and there's no confetti after 8pm.

The Arcade holds mini-games like Kitchen Quest (a stage-map cooking adventure) and Veggie Runner, plus bonus rounds and seasonal events. Games unlock as logging streaks grow and use Sparks for stages and gear — they're real games, short by design, and bounded by parent-set windows.

No. Nothing inside the Arcade — stages, gear, bonus rounds — can be bought with money. Everything costs Sparks, and Sparks are only earned by logging. There is no purchase flow in the kid experience at all.

It's engineered against that: no loot boxes, no punishing timers, no midnight-deadline notifications, warm endings when caps are reached, and a nightlight mode that helps end the day. Most of a Food Replay day happens off-screen — eating, moving, tasting. The app is the scorekeeper, not the activity.

Every evening, the day's real logs become a short comic chapter starring your child's hero — eat five colours and Nova paints a rainbow sky. It's a bedtime story the child wrote by eating, and it replaces the end-of-day report card most trackers guilt kids with.

After sunset, Food Replay dims into nightlight mode: softer colours, a sleepy hero, gentler motion and no celebrations after 8pm. It signals winding down, so the app helps close the day instead of extending it.

Everyone competes against their own age-fitted goals, so the board ranks effort, not appetite — a 6-year-old can beat a 12-year-old and Dad in the same week. Food Replay never compares siblings' food or bodies directly; sibling comparisons are banned at the design level.

Yes — parents can join the family leaderboard with their own goals, start streak duels and feed the shared family goal. Kids love beating a parent fairly, and modelling the habit is half the point.

A friendly challenge between two family members over who can keep showing up — logging daily — for the duel period. It measures consistency, not food, so any two people of any ages can duel fairly. Cheering is built in; trash talk isn't.

Food Replay is built around what works for picky eating: repeated low-pressure exposure, celebration of tiny tries, and zero punishment. Tasting quests make one bite a win, new foods appear as adventures rather than demands, and nothing ever shames a refusal. Our guide to picky eating goes deeper.

Parents can note allergies and conditions during setup, and those foods simply don't appear in suggestions. Food Replay supports healthy habits but isn't a medical device — for diagnosed conditions that require dietary management, use it alongside, never instead of, your paediatrician's or dietitian's guidance.

No. The kid experience contains no weight talk, no body commentary, no 'diet' framing and no calorie counts. Optional height and weight fields exist only on the parent side, only if a parent adds them, and only to fit age-appropriate targets.

Food Replay is built around COPPA's core requirement: verifiable parental consent before any child data is collected. A parent creates the account, consents, and controls each child profile. We also follow GDPR-K / Age-Appropriate Design Code principles — data minimisation and high-privacy defaults — worldwide.

The minimum the features need: a first name or nickname, an age band, meal and activity logs, and any optional health inputs a parent chooses to add. No precise location, no contacts, no ad identifiers. The full table is on our Safety & Privacy page.

Photos are processed to recognise the food, stored only to show your family its own log history, and deleted with the log or the account. They are never used for advertising, never sold, and never used to train systems in a way that identifies your child.

No. There is no chat, no friend list and no public leaderboard for children — every social feature works only inside your own family account. Nobody outside the family can see, message or interact with a child through Food Replay.

No ads in the kid experience, full stop — no banners, no sponsored content, no ad-funded games. Food Replay is paid for by the family subscription, not by your child's attention.

Yes. Parents can export or delete all family data from Settings → Privacy or by emailing [email protected]. Deletion removes personal data from production within 30 days and backups within 90, except records the law requires us to keep (like payment records).

One family subscription covers every child on the account and unlocks all four seasonal worlds, all arcade games, all comics and the full parent dashboard. Current local pricing is shown in the App Store and Google Play listings.

The core loop — logging, powers, streaks and the first arcade experiences — is free to try, so your family can feel whether Food Replay fits before subscribing. No card is needed to start.

Subscriptions are managed by Apple or Google, so cancelling takes a minute in your App Store or Google Play subscription settings and never requires contacting us. Your data stays available until you delete the account.

Email [email protected] and a human replies — usually within one working day. For privacy questions, [email protected] reaches the team directly.