1. Purpose
This Policy protects honest customer feedback and fair marketplace competition. Official reviews and rankings should reflect genuine marketplace experiences — not advertising budgets, manipulation, retaliation, or undisclosed relationships.
2. Verified Reviews
A review may be labeled verified when it is associated with a service the Platform reasonably confirms occurred. Verification may consider booking records, payment records, completion status, messages, and supporting information.
Only verified completed services should directly affect official ChefScore™ calculations unless otherwise clearly disclosed.
3. Review Categories
Customers may rate food quality, taste, presentation, communication, professionalism, timeliness, cleanliness, accuracy, value, cleanup, overall experience, and would hire again.
4. Honest Feedback
Users may express honest opinions, including negative opinions. A review will not be removed merely because it is unfavorable, a Chef disagrees with it, it affects a ranking, or it describes a genuine disappointment.
5. Prohibited Reviews
Reviews may be removed or excluded when they are fake, describe a service that did not occur, are submitted by the Chef about themselves, come from undisclosed employees, owners, agents, or close relatives, are purchased, are generated through duplicate accounts, contain threats, include hate speech, reveal private information, contain knowingly false factual claims, are used for extortion, are unrelated to the service, violate law, or infringe rights.
6. Incentives
A general incentive for submitting honest feedback may be permitted only when it is not conditioned on sentiment, is clearly disclosed where required, users are free to provide any honest rating, and the program does not distort rankings. The Platform may exclude incentivized reviews from certain rankings.
7. Review Suppression
All Dem Chefz™ will not suppress a legitimate negative review merely to protect a Chef's reputation. We may delay or remove content only for legitimate reasons such as fraud investigation, privacy, harassment, irrelevance, legal requirements, policy violations, or unverified service.
8. Chef Responses
Chefz may post one professional public response. Responses may not reveal private customer information, threaten legal action solely to silence criticism, harass, offer payment for removal, discriminate, or make knowingly false claims.
9. Review Disputes
A Chef may dispute a review by identifying a specific policy violation. Disagreement with an opinion is not enough. During review, we may examine booking records, messages, photographs, timing, payment records, and supporting statements.
10. ChefScore™
ChefScore™ may consider verified ratings, recent performance, completed services, consistency, timeliness, communication, repeat customers, cancellations, complaints, would-hire-again percentage, and fraud indicators. The score may use weighting, normalization, minimum sample sizes, confidence adjustments, and anti-manipulation controls.
11. Ranking Categories
Rankings may be organized by national, state, metro, city, neighborhood, cuisine, occasion, service, new Chef, Grandma's Kitchen™, corporate readiness, and meal preparation.
12. Ranking Movement
Rankings may update after verified activity or on scheduled cycles. A Chef may move down even without a new negative review when another Chef demonstrates stronger current performance.
13. Membership and Rankings
Paid membership may provide greater exposure, feature eligibility, or earlier opportunity notifications. Paid membership does not directly purchase ChefScore™ points, positive reviews, official ranking placement, or customer satisfaction. Sponsored placements must be clearly distinguishable from earned rankings.
14. Fraud and Manipulation
Prohibited conduct includes buying reviews, review exchanges, duplicate-account reviews, competitor sabotage, coordinated review attacks, undisclosed insider reviews, manipulated bookings created solely to generate ratings, threatening customers, and conditioning discounts on positive sentiment. Consequences may include review removal, ranking adjustment, suspension, forfeiture of badges, or termination.
15. Ranking Corrections
We may correct technical errors, duplicate data, fraudulent activity, misclassified services, incorrect market assignments, and calculation problems. Rankings are dynamic and do not constitute a guarantee or professional credential.