Privacy and data handling
The rules that produce every read.
This page is the formal version of the promises the rest of the site makes. Nothing here is legal boilerplate. Every sentence is a rule we hold ourselves to, and every rule is enforceable at the data layer, not just the UI.
The four rules
What holds. Always.
5
Minimum restaurants in any peer cell before a comparison renders. Enforced in the database, not the interface.
0
Named competitors, in any client-facing document. Ever.
0
Data sold or resold to third parties. Not to distributors, not to marketplaces, not to anyone.
Yours
The data you provide. If you leave, you take it. Full export, portable format, thirty-day read-only wind-down.
What we collect
The data you provide, and nothing else.
We collect only what is needed to produce the Diagnostic and run the dashboard.
From your POS: your product mix, sales, comps, promos, and hours. Where a direct integration is in place, this arrives through the POS provider's API. Where it is not, you send us an export.
From your food invoices: line items, unit costs, quantities, and dates. From every distributor you use, not only PFG.
From your public marketing surfaces: your website menu, your Google Business Profile, your published marketplace listings on Grubhub, Uber Eats, and DoorDash. These are public and would be readable by any guest.
Nothing else. We do not collect your P&L. We do not collect your labor data. We do not collect your rent, your loans, your ownership structure, your reservation system data, or your guest personal information. If a client-side integration ever surfaces information beyond the list above, we surface it back to you and delete it.
Where it lives
In your workspace. Never in someone else's.
Every operator's data lives in a dedicated workspace inside our platform. Your POS product mix, your invoices, your reconciliations, and your dashboards belong to your workspace and only your workspace.
Peer ranges are the one place your data ever contributes outside your workspace. The contribution is anonymized at the cell level. A peer cell requires a minimum of five restaurants before any comparison renders. That minimum is enforced in the database itself, not by the front-end, so no interface state and no bug can cause a comparison to run below the threshold.
We do not share your data with other operators. We do not share your data with PFG, Sysco, US Foods, or any distributor, regardless of who introduced you to Margin Lab. We do not share your data with marketplaces, POS providers, or third-party analytics firms.
Aggregate, anonymized peer ranges are published back into every operator's dashboard. That is the entire cross-account data flow. Nothing else.
What we never do
The rules that will not bend.
We do not sell data. To any distributor, any marketplace, any POS provider, any analytics firm, any ad platform, or any other operator.
We do not resell data. If a third party asks whether they can access aggregate insights from Margin Lab in exchange for payment, the answer is no.
We do not run comparisons below five restaurants per cell. If your restaurant is unusual and does not have five peers in its cell, that comparison does not render. We tell you which cells passed the minimum and which did not.
We do not name competitors, in any deliverable, in any dashboard, in any brief, in any appendix, ever. Anonymization is a rule, not a design choice.
We do not use your data to train models we resell to other companies. Any model we train on aggregate anonymized peer data stays inside Margin Lab and is used only to improve peer benchmarks for our own clients.
We do not share your invoices with your PFG rep, your Sysco rep, or your account team at any distributor. If you accept a PFG Growth Grant, your rep sees the same dashboard your Ignite team sees. Your P&L, your invoices, and anything not derived from the reconciliation stay with Ignite XDS.
If you leave
You keep your read. Your workspace closes.
If you cancel Margin Watch, or if you complete a Diagnostic and choose not to continue, your evidence cards, executive brief, and appendix are yours to keep in perpetuity. They are your deliverables.
Your dashboard goes read-only for thirty days after you cancel, so you can pull anything you need. During that window, we provide a full data export in a portable format, on request, at no cost.
After thirty days your workspace is archived. The data is retained for another sixty days in cold storage in case you return. After ninety days total, the workspace and all POS and invoice data are deleted.
Aggregate anonymized peer data that your restaurant contributed remains in the peer network, at the cell level, unnamed. You may request even that contribution be removed. We honor the request within thirty days.
Security
What we do, and what we are working toward.
All data transfers between your systems and Margin Lab are encrypted in transit. All data at rest is encrypted using industry-standard encryption at the storage layer.
Access to any operator's workspace is limited to the named Ignite XDS team assigned to your engagement, and to you and the users you invite. Access is logged.
Forms on this site are protected by Cloudflare Turnstile, which checks that a submission is coming from a person rather than a script. Turnstile sets no cookies and does not profile you across sites, so it runs as strictly necessary security and is not something we ask you to consent to. The check happens only at the moment you submit.
We are pursuing SOC 2 Type I certification, followed by Type II, as the platform scales. This page will be updated as those certifications complete.
If you have a security concern, or you believe your data has been mishandled, contact us directly at info@ignitexds.com. Our response time is one business day for security-related notes.
Common questions
What operators ask about data.
Can my PFG rep see my food invoices?
No. Never. Your PFG rep sees the same dashboard your Ignite team sees, which shows anonymized peer ranges, marketplace-normalized pricing, catering transparency, and AI visibility. Invoices, P&L, and anything not derived from reconciliation stay with Ignite XDS.
What if I use PFG plus another distributor?
Margin Lab reads invoices from every distributor you use. Your PFG rep still only sees the anonymized dashboard read. The other distributors' invoices are processed alongside PFG's and never revealed to any distributor.
Does contributing to the peer network hurt me competitively?
Every peer contribution is anonymized at the cell level, and every cell requires five restaurants before it renders. Your restaurant appears in another operator's peer range only as one anonymized data point. The same applies in reverse. If your restaurant is unusual enough that a five-restaurant cell cannot form, that comparison does not run.
What if I do not want to contribute to the peer network at all?
You can opt out. Your Diagnostic and dashboard still function. You will see peer ranges built from operators who did contribute, and your restaurant will not appear in anyone else's peer data. Ask for the opt-out on the first call and it is set from your first data upload.
Do you use AI to look at my data?
Yes, in specific and disclosed ways. We use AI models to normalize marketplace prices, to test AI-answer-engine visibility against public data about your restaurant, and to generate the Opportunity Model ranges. We do not use AI models that train on your data and resell the result to third parties.
What happens if Margin Lab is acquired?
Our commitments in this page are contractual, not just editorial. They travel with the business. If we are acquired, the acquirer inherits the same rules, including anonymization at n=5, no data resale, and the ability of any operator to request full data deletion. If any acquirer wants to change these rules, every operator would be notified and given the option to withdraw their data before the change takes effect.
Questions we did not answer
Ask directly.
If a specific data-handling question is not covered on this page, ask on the first call. We have a written answer to almost every question an operator has raised, and if we do not, we will get one within one business day.