# Recipes or delivery, rank on the dishes people search for.

> ASO for food and drink apps starts by separating recipes, restaurants and delivery: on the App Store, Food & Drink covers recipes, cooking guides and restaurant reviews, while services consumed outside the app, such as food delivery, are sold with your own payment method rather than the store's in-app purchase on both stores.

## What makes ASO different in this category?

- **What Food & Drink covers**: On the App Store, Food & Drink is for apps that offer recommendations, instruction or critique about preparing, consuming or reviewing food and beverages: recipe collections, cooking guides, restaurant reviews, dietary and food allergy, alcohol reviews. On Google Play, Food and Drink covers recipes, restaurants, food guides and beverage recipes. Weight loss is a Health & Fitness example on the App Store. [1] [2]
- **Orders and groceries skip store billing**: Under Guideline 3.1.3(e), physical goods and services consumed outside the app use a purchase method other than in-app purchase, such as Apple Pay or card entry. Google Play's Payments policy also says its billing system must not be used for groceries or food delivery. [3] [4]
- **A line on alcohol**: Guideline 1.4.3 does not permit apps that encourage consumption of excessive amounts of alcohol, and apps that encourage minors to drink are rejected. Write drink and cocktail listings with that line in mind. [3]
- **Nutrition tracking falls under the health declaration**: In Google Play's Health apps declaration, Nutrition and Weight Management covers tools for tracking dietary intake, planning meals and managing weight. A food app with meal plans or calorie tracking fills in that declaration in Play Console accordingly. [5]
- **Review summaries on the product page**: In some App Store storefronts, the product page shows a review summary generated with large language models from user reviews and refreshed on an ongoing basis. The summary rating is also specific to each storefront, so delivery or recipe reviews become part of the page's first impression. [6]

## Features that matter most

- [Reviews and insights](https://uptika.app/en/product/reviews): Reads reviews every 6 hours, splits them into complaints, bugs, requests and praise, and drafts replies.
- [Keyword hunt](https://uptika.app/en/product/keyword-hunt): Finds recipe, cuisine and diet searches from store autocomplete and your rivals' top 10 terms, measured for popularity and difficulty.
- [Copy workshop](https://uptika.app/en/product/copy-workshop): Drafts your title, subtitle, keyword field and short description with live character limits and keyword coverage.
- [Localization](https://uptika.app/en/product/localization): Shows the languages each App Store storefront indexes and the ones you are missing, since food searches change from country to country.

## Questions

### Should my food delivery app use Google Play's billing system?

No. Google Play's Payments policy says its billing system must not be used for physical services such as food delivery or for groceries.

### Which category fits a recipe app with calorie tracking?

Apple says the primary category should describe the main function: Food & Drink if it is mainly recipes, Health & Fitness if it is mainly about weight loss. Use the secondary category for the other.

## Sources

1. [Categories and discoverability (Apple Developer)](https://developer.apple.com/app-store/categories/)
2. [Choose a category and tags for your app or game (Play Console Help)](https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/9859673)
3. [App Review Guidelines 1.4.3, 3.1.3 (Apple Developer)](https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/)
4. [Payments policy (Play Console Help)](https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/9858738)
5. [Provide information for the Health apps declaration form (Play Console Help)](https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/14738291)
6. [Ratings, reviews, and responses (Apple Developer)](https://developer.apple.com/app-store/ratings-and-reviews/)

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Uptika is an ASO and store-intelligence tool for the App Store and Google Play. https://uptika.app/en/categories/food-and-drink · Last updated: 2026-11-05