Policy brief: safe cooking machines and safe food donation
For: ministers and officials for food safety, consumer protection, digital policy and social protection; legislators; standards bodies. Length: two pages. Status: draft, 2026-10-04. Cookwala is an open, royalty-free technical standard maintained in public; it is not endorsed by any government or agency.
The situation #
- Cooking machines are entering homes and commercial kitchens: countertop robots, smart ovens, and general-purpose robots whose makers say they will cook. Each maker writes its own recipes and decides alone what "done" and "safe" mean. Regulation covers appliances and software separately; nothing covers "a recipe a machine executes".
- AI agents are beginning to plan meals, order groceries and start appliances for people. They can be instructed by text they read, including text planted in a recipe.
- Food banks and school-meal programs rescue surplus food with phone calls and spreadsheets. Cold-chain checks and impact counts differ by site; data about the people served is sometimes collected without need.
What an open standard offers #
Cookwala Core 0.2 is a small standard that we estimate a device maker could implement in about a week (assumed; no maker has implemented it yet). It defines:
- Operation envelopes: every heat operation has a physical temperature band and a ladder of ways to verify it; a device that cannot verify a step refuses before heating anything. No oil thermometer means no deep frying.
- Safety limits enforced on the device, which no recipe, agent, message or update can raise; a local stop that works without a network.
- Signed, hashed records: recipes, device capabilities, recalls and execution logs can be checked by anyone; keys can be revoked; event logs carry witnessed checkpoints.
- Agent rules: an agent acts only under a signed mandate with spending caps and a list of actions that need a person's confirmation; all text in recipes is data, never instructions.
- Anonymous incident reporting, modelled on aviation's confidential reporting, so every maker learns from each near miss.
- A conformance suite (106 public test vectors) and a report format behind any claim.
The Humanitarian Profile adds a data standard for food donation with no personal data: organizations only, aggregate counts, temperature checks at every handover, and nutrition and food-safety rules derived from WHO and Codex guidance, reviewable by professionals and replaceable by national rules. It works by SMS and spreadsheet.
What governments can do #
| Action | Effort | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Ask the national standards body to review Core 0.2 and comment publicly | weeks | A technical basis for guidance on cooking machines; complementary to ISO 13482 and IEC 60335, which it does not replace |
| Fund a 12-week pre-registered pilot with a school-meal or food-bank program | months | Evidence, published whatever it shows |
| Review the Humanitarian Profile's data-protection rules for food-donation programs (no personal data, aggregates, small-cell suppression); its rule packs are unreviewed drafts | months | Food rescue that protects the people it serves and produces comparable numbers |
| Reference "refusal before heat", on-device safety limits and incident reporting in guidance for connected cooking appliances, after independent review and two implementations | later | Makers have a concrete target; consumers get machines that refuse rather than guess |
Use the model language (MODEL-LANGUAGE.md) for donor-protection and data clauses | at drafting | Clauses that match a working data standard |
| Run a national registry node and recall feed | months | Recalls of unsafe recipes and devices reach kitchens without depending on a foreign server |
What this is not #
Not a certification (the path to one is described; no certifier has been engaged). Not medical advice. Not a product. Not a claim to end hunger: hunger is driven by poverty, conflict, climate and prices, and this standard contributes through waste, safety and coordination.
Status and governance #
Core 0.2 is a draft under public review; everything else is a draft or experimental profile. Decisions are made in public on GitHub with written reasons; a steering committee with seats for food banks, a low- or middle-income country, labour, privacy and dietetics takes over once there are independent adopters; the specification moves to a neutral foundation with a patent non-assertion pledge. Critiques are published with the responses (docs/CRITIQUES.md).
Where to look #
cookwala.ai · docs/CORE.md · docs/HUMANITARIAN-PROFILE.md · docs/CERTIFICATION.md · conformance/ · GOVERNANCE.md