Last Updated: February 1, 2026

Hodo Foods, Inc., and its subsidiaries and affiliated companies (“Hodo” or “Company”) takes your privacy seriously.  We want you to know how we collect, use, disclose, and retain your personal information.

Scope

This Privacy Policy applies to the personal information of individuals (“you”, “your”, or “yours”) collected by Hodo, including the personal information collected when you visit our website https://www.hodofoods.com as it may be modified, relocated and/or redirected from time to time (the “Site”).  This Privacy Policy does not apply to the personal information of individuals in their capacity as prospective, current, or former employees, contract workers, board members, or owners of Hodo, or their emergency contacts, dependents, or beneficiaries.

“Personal information” means information that identifies, relates to, describes, is reasonably capable of being associated with, or could reasonably be linked, directly or indirectly, with a particular individual or household.

Other web sites

The Site may contain links to other web sites not operated or controlled by us (“Third Party Sites”).  The policies and procedures we describe here do not apply to Third Party Sites.  The links from the Site do not imply that we endorse or have reviewed the Third Party Sites.  We suggest contacting those sites directly for information on their privacy policies.

Calbee

Hodo is part of the Calbee family of companies, and Hodo’s parent company Calbee, Inc., also accesses personal data collected by Hodo for the purposes of the Calbee enterprise.  As a result, the Global Privacy Policy produced by Calbee also applies to the processing of your information and should be reviewed alongside this Privacy Policy. You can find the Global Privacy Policy here https://www.calbee.co.jp/en/privacy/. 

This Privacy Policy explains:

  1. What categories of personal information we collect

  2. The categories of sources from which we collect this personal information

  3. The purposes for which we use your personal information

  4. How we may disclose your personal information

  5. How we protect the personal information we collect 

  6. How long we keep your personal information

  7. Additional information for California residents

  8. Changes to this Privacy Policy

Notice at Collection for California Residents:  

Hodo collects the personal information identified in Section 1 for the purposes identified in Section 3 and retains it for the period described in Section 6. We do not sell your personal information under the common meaning of that term, but we do disclose personal data about your activity on our Site for cross-context behavioral advertising (“sharing”) and to our business partners in a manner that may be characterized as a “sale” under the California Consumer Privacy Act.  We do not collect or process sensitive personal information for the purpose of inferring characteristics about you. To the extent you provide Hodo with personal information about other California residents, you are responsible for providing this notice to them.

CHILDREN’S ONLINE PRIVACY PROTECTION ACT COMPLIANCE

We do not collect information from anyone under 16 years of age.  The products and/or services we provide, together with our Site, are all directed to individuals who are at least 16 years old. If you are under the age of 16, you are not authorized to use our services or the Site.

1) WHAT CATEGORIES OF PERSONAL INFORMATION WE COLLECT

  • Identifiers, for example: real name, alias, telephone number, postal address, and e-mail address. 

  • Commercial Information, for example: sales inquiries, records of products or services purchased, website search queries, and purchasing or consuming histories.   

  • Other Personal Information: 

Financial Information, for example: payment card details, billing address, and shipping address.

User Content, includes content you submit when you contact Hodo.

Communications Data, for example: during our communications with you, we collect the content of these communications as well as metadata about the communications, i.e., date and time of the email.

  • Characteristics of Protected Classifications Under California or Federal Law, for example: your age or gender. 

  • Internet or Other Electronic Network Activity Information, for example: information about your usage of the Site, such as the pages you viewed, the services and features you used or interacted with; your browser type and details about any links or communications with which you interacted; internet protocol (IP); browser plug-in types and versions; and operating systems and platform.

  • Geolocation data, for example: certain features in our services/platform may collect your precise location information if you grant permission to do so in your device settings.

  • Sensory or Surveillance Data, for example: voicemails and recordings as described above in “User Content”.

  • Professional Information, for example: business contact information and title.

  • Inferences, for example: Hodo might infer based on your Site interaction history that you would be interested in other products or services. 

Do We Use Cookies?

Yes. Cookies are small files that the Site or our service provider transfers to your computer’s hard drive through your Web browser that enables the Site’s or service provider’s systems to recognize your browser and capture and remember certain information. We use cookies to help us understand how users use the Site. For example, cookies gather information about how long you spend on a web page so that we can understand what web pages are of most interest to users.

If you prefer, you can choose to have your computer warn you each time a cookie is being sent, or you can choose to turn off cookies by adjusting your browser settings. If you turn off your cookies, some of the features on the Site may not function properly. 

Web Beacons 

We include small graphic images or other web programming code, called web beacons (also known as "pixel tags", “web bugs” or "clear GIFs"), on the Site. The web beacons are minute graphics with a unique identifier. They are used to track the online movements of Web users. In contrast to cookies, which are stored in a user's computer hard drive, web beacons are embedded invisibly on Web pages and are about the size of the period at the end of this sentence.  Rejecting cookies using browser settings may not stop web beacons from tracking you. 

Tracking Across Time and Different Sites

The Site tracks your online activities over time and across websites or online services on an individually identifiable basis.  We do allow third parties to use our Site to track your activities over time or across other websites.

Do Not Track Setting

The Site currently does not respond to web browser “do not track” (DNT) signals or other mechanisms that indicate your preference for having information collected over time and across different web sites following your visit to our Site.  DNT is a preference you can set in your browser’s settings to let the website you visit, including the Site, know that you do not want the websites collecting your personal information.  You can also visit https://allaboutdnt.com/ to learn more.

2) THE CATEGORIES OF SOURCES FROM WHICH WE COLLECT YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION

  • You, for example, when you register with our Site, when you shop with us, or when you otherwise provide information directly to us. 

  • Service providers, for example, analytics providers, IT, and system administration services.

  • Affiliated companies, for example, so that we can assist other companies in the Hodo and Calbee family of companies in providing you with products or services.

  • Automated technologies, for example, browsing activity collected by automated technologies on the Site.

  • Marketing/advertising companies, for example, from social media platforms, consumer research companies, and analytics or marketing/advertising companies.

  • Recording technologies installed by Hodo, for example, voicemail technologies and audio recording technologies with consent to the extent required by law.

  • Acquired entity, if Hodo acquired another entity, Hodo might collect personal information from that entity. 

  • Other sources, for example, personal information acquired by Hodo’s parent company or its affiliates.

3) THE PURPOSES FOR WHICH WE USE YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION

We use the categories of personal information we collect for one or more of the purposes below:

Providing Products and Services, including:

  • To deliver our products and administer our services.

  • To communicate with you.

  • To provide Hodo coupons and Company merchandise.

  • To improve our products and services, develop new products and services, and conduct research on further improvements.

  • To enhance your experience using our products and services and to personalize your online experience.

Support and Marketing, including:

  • For customer support.

  • To provide our newsletter.

  • To respond to any requests, queries, suggestions, feedback, or comments you may have.

  • To send you marketing information about our products and services, including notifying you of marketing events, membership and rewards programs, promotions, and sweepstakes, with your consent in accordance with applicable law.

  • To inform you of any changes to the services, your account (if applicable), this Privacy Policy, or any other policies or terms in relation thereto.

  • To perform operations to maintain the services, including to conduct data analysis, testing, and research; and to monitor and analyze usage and activity trends.

Monitoring, Security, and Compliance, including:

  • To administer and protect our business and our Site (including troubleshooting, analysis, testing, system maintenance, support, reporting and hosting of data, and preventing fraud and abuse).

  • To store, host, or backup (whether for disaster recovery or otherwise) our services or any data contained therein.

  • To protect the rights, property, or safety of you, Hodo, or others.

  • In connection with a corporate transaction, sale, or assignment of assets, merger, divestiture, or other changes of control or financial status of Hodo or any of its subsidiaries or affiliates.

  • Detecting malicious or illegal activity. 

  • To report suspected criminal conduct to law enforcement and cooperate in investigations.

  • To exercise Hodo’s rights under applicable law and to support any claim, defense, or declaration in a case or before a jurisdictional and/or administrative authority, arbitration, or mediation panel.

  • To ensure compliance with applicable laws and regulatory obligations.

Incidental Purposes: Any incidental purposes related to, or in connection with, the above.

4) HOW WE MAY DISCLOSE YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION

Hodo discloses personal information as necessary for the purposes described in Section 3 above to the following categories of external recipients:

  • Service providers and contractors: Hodo discloses your personal information to service providers and contractors for the purposes above to assist us in meeting our business needs and contractual and legal obligations.

  • Affiliated companies: Other companies within the Hodo and Calbee family of companies, for example, to provide you with our products and services.

  • Third parties: For example, we might disclose personal information to lawyers to assist us with legal compliance or to business partners to assist us in providing services to you. 

  • Interactive Site features: If we use a chatbot, search function, online forms, or other interactive forms on our site, these features may transmit your queries and inputs in real time to the service provider that supports the feature.

  • Government or administrative agencies: For example, Hodo may report unlawful activity to law enforcement.  

  • Public: Hodo may disclose personal information to the public as part of a press release, for example, to announce the winner of a sweepstakes if required by state law. 

  • Required Disclosures: We may be required to disclose personal information in a court proceeding, in response to a court order, subpoena, civil discovery request, other legal process, or as otherwise required by law.

  • Legal Compliance and Protections: We may disclose personal information when we believe disclosure is necessary to comply with the law or to protect the rights, property, or safety of Hodo, our users, or others.

  • Corporate Transactions: We reserve the right to disclose and transfer your personal information, including your personal information:

    • To a subsequent owner or co-owner.

    • In connection with a corporate merger, consolidation, bankruptcy, the sale of substantially all of our membership interests and/or assets or other corporate change, including to any prospective purchasers. 

5) HOW WE PROTECT THE PERSONAL INFORMATION WE COLLECT

The security and confidentiality of your personal information is important to us.  We have technical, administrative, and physical security measures in place to protect your personal information from unauthorized access or disclosure and improper use.  

For example, we use Transport Layer Security (TLS) encryption to protect the data collection forms on our Site. In addition, we restrict access to your personal information. Only employees who need the personal information to perform a specific job (for example, a customer service representative) are granted access to personal information. Employees with access to personal information are kept up-to-date on our security and privacy practices. 

It is important for you to protect against unauthorized access to your password and to your computer. Be sure to close your browser after you have completed your visit to the Site. 

Please note that despite our reasonable efforts, no security measure is ever perfect or impenetrable, so we cannot guarantee the security of your personal information.

6) HOW LONG WE KEEP YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION

We retain your personal information for the duration of the customer relationship, if any. We also retain your personal information for 12 months after our last interaction with you. We will retain personal information longer as necessary to comply with legal, administrative, or procedural requirements, for example, a litigation hold.

7) ADDITIONAL INFORMATION FOR CALIFORNIA RESIDENTS 

A.    Information About Disclosures of Personal Information

1. Disclosures for Business Purposes

Hodo has disclosed each of the categories of personal information listed in Section 1, above, for the following “business purposes”, as that term is defined under the California Consumer Privacy Act (“CCPA”), in the last 12 months:

  • Service providers:  For the business purpose of performing services on Hodo’s behalf and, in particular, for the specific purposes described in Section 3, above.

  • Auditors, lawyers, consultants, and accountants engaged by Hodo:  For the business purpose of auditing compliance with policies and applicable laws, in addition to performing services on Hodo’s behalf.

  • Affiliated companies:  To other companies within the Hodo and Calbee family of companies for the business purposes of (1) auditing compliance with policies and applicable laws, (2) helping to ensure security and integrity, (3) debugging, (4) short-term transient use, (5) performing services on behalf of Hodo, (6) internal research, and (7) activities to maintain or improve the quality or safety of a service or device.

2. Sales and Sharing

We do not “sell” your personal information as most people would understand that term, meaning that we do not disclose your personal information to any third party in exchange for a monetary payment. However, as is common practice among businesses operating online, we may allow third parties to receive information about you via cookies and other tracking technologies for purposes of analyzing and optimizing our services, to personalize your online experience by providing advertisements that are more relevant to you, and for statistical research and analytics. These activities may be defined as “sale’ or “sharing” of personal information under the CCPA. The CCPA defines “sharing” to mean disclosing personal information to a third party for its cross-context behavioral advertising purposes.

In the last 12 months, we have disclosed Internet or Other Electronic Network Activity Information, to analytics providers network advertisers and business partners that Hodo jointly collaborates with on marketing campaigns, for example social media platforms, and such disclosure may be considered a “sale” or “sharing” of personal information. We disclose this personal information to enable marketing to you and to deliver personalized advertising on the Website and in other interactions that you have with the Company while online.

We have no actual knowledge that we have sold or “shared” the personal information of children under 16, in the last 12 months and we have no intention to do so. 

3. Aggregated and Deidentified Information

We may aggregate and/or deidentify information, use it internally, and disclose to third parties.  Neither Aggregated Information nor Deidentified Information (defined below) is personal information.

  • “Aggregated Information” refers to information about a group of individuals from which the individually identifiable information has been removed. An example of Aggregated Information would be the statistic that 20 people used our website’s contact form on a given day.  

  • “Deidentified Information” means information subjected to reasonable measures to ensure that the deidentified information cannot be associated with the individual. An example of Deidentified Information would be the data point that an unidentified visitor first entered the Site through our main web page. We maintain Deidentified Information in a deidentified form and do not attempt to reidentify it, except that we may attempt to reidentify the information just to determine whether our deidentification processes function correctly. 

B.  Your California Privacy Rights

Subject to applicable law, California residents have the following rights:

  • Right to Know: You have the right to submit a verifiable request for specific pieces of your personal information and for information about Hodo’s collection, use, and disclosure of your personal information.  In addition, you have a right to know the categories of your personal information that Hodo sold or shared for cross-context behavioral advertising and the parties to which those categories were sold or shared.  Please note that the CCPA’s right to obtain “specific pieces” does not grant a right to the whole of any document that contains personal information, but only to discrete items of personal information.  Moreover, California residents generally just have a right to know categories, for example, categories of third parties to which personal information is disclosed, but not the individual third parties.  

  • Right to Delete: You have the right to submit a verifiable request for the deletion of personal information that you have provided to Hodo.

  • Right to Correct: You have the right to submit a verifiable request for the correction of inaccurate personal information maintained by Hodo, taking into account the nature of the personal information and the purposes of processing the personal information.

  • Right to Opt out of Sale and Sharing: You have the right to opt out of the sale of your personal information and the disclosure of your personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising.  You may also implement a browser setting or extension to communicate your selling and sharing preferences automatically to the websites you visit. We honor your right to opt out of the sale and sharing of your personal information as signaled by a universal opt out signal or Global Privacy Control (“GPC”).  To enable GPC, you can visit the Global Privacy Control page at https://globalprivacycontrol.org.  If you download a supported browser or extension and exercise your privacy rights with GPC, we will turn off certain third-party cookies on our website after our website detects a GPC signal.  However, if you visit our website from a different device or from a different browser on the same device, you will need to opt-out or use an opt-out preference signal for that browser and/or device.  

Note on Sensitive Personal Information: Hodo does not infer characteristics from sensitive personal information.  Hodo only uses sensitive personal information as necessary to perform the services or provide the goods the average person would reasonably expect when requesting those goods or services, to ensure security and integrity, short term transient use, to maintain the quality of our products and services, or for other purposes permitted by the California Consumer Privacy Act and implementing regulations (“CCPA”) without the right to opt out.

C. How to Exercise Your Rights

Hodo will respond to requests to know, delete, and correct in accordance with applicable law if it can verify the identity of the individual submitting the request.  You can exercise these rights in the following ways:

To opt out of the disclosure of your personal information for purposes of cross-context behavioral advertising or the sale of your personal information, click here: Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information

D. How We Will Verify Your Request

We match personal information that you provide us against personal information we maintain in our files.  The more risk entailed by the request (e.g., a request for specific pieces of personal information), the more items of personal information we may request to verify your identity.  If we cannot verify your identity to a sufficient level of certainty to respond securely to your request, we will let you know promptly and explain why we cannot verify your identity.

E. Authorized Agents

You may designate an authorized agent to exercise your right to know, to correct, or to delete. If an authorized agent submits a request on your behalf, the authorized agent must submit with the request another document signed by you that authorizes the authorized agent to submit the request on your behalf.  In addition, we may ask you or your authorized agent to follow the applicable process described above for verifying your identity. 

In the alternative, you can provide a power of attorney compliant with the California Probate Code.

F. Hodo’s Non-Discrimination Policy

Hodo will not unlawfully discriminate against you for exercising your privacy rights under the California Consumer Privacy Act.

G. Notice of Financial Incentives

Occasionally, Hodo may offer you free Hodo merchandise or Hodo product coupons in exchange for registering to receive a Company email newsletter or for following and/or sharing posts on social media. The coupons may provide free products or discounts on product purchases. These offers may be considered a Financial Incentive Program under California law. In order to register you for the newsletter, we may use your name, e-mail address and/or postal zip code to identify you as a subscriber and to provide you with news, promotions, and updates that may be of interest to you.  When you follow us on social media or share our posts, we may collect your handle or profile on social media and use that to display advertisements to you and other information that you might find interesting.  You may opt-out of the newsletter program at any time by unsubscribing using the link provided within each newsletter you receive from us. These financial incentives are reasonably related to the value of the data you provide and are valued between $1 and $20, based on the value of a typical coupon or free merchandise. 

8) CHANGES TO THIS PRIVACY POLICY

If we change this Privacy Policy, we will post those changes on this page and update the Privacy Policy modification date above.  

For More Information

For questions or concerns about Hodo’s privacy policies and practices, please contact us at privacy@hodofoods.com.