Want to know how Vital Farms, Inc. handles your personal info and data? It’s all here in our Privacy Policy Statement. We’ll try to keep it easy to read and to the point, after all we’re not fans of bullsh*t. By accessing our website or using our services, you agree to this privacy policy statement. And, if you have any questions as you’re reading through, don’t hesitate to give us call or drop us a line. Our contact info is at the bottom.
This policy applies to all our products, services, newsletters, emails, advertisements, public forms (including sign up and inquiry forms), website, apps, social media sites and affiliates, unless we say otherwise. To keep the policy short and sweet, when we state “services,” we’re referring to all the items just listed above. While someday Vital Farms could have operations outside of the U.S., we don’t right now, so this policy only refers to services provided in the United States.
Personal Information – Collection and Use
Let’s face it, like most companies, we collect information from you whenever you use Vital Farms services. This information is not only about you but also how you use our services.
When you register for an account, you agree to provide us with true, accurate, current and complete information. If it isn’t, we might close your account and not do business with you in the future (we really don’t want to have to do this!) When you create an account, make sure you create a username and password that is unique. Memorize them or keep them in a safe place, since we aren’t responsible if they get used without your permission.
Whenever you order Vital Farms Merchandise (check out our cool stuff here) you provide your name, billing address, shipping address, phone #, email address and purchased items. We store this information on a secure database on our servers here in the USA to keep it safe. We also collect payment information from you, like your credit card and expiration date, however this information is stored with a trusted third-party commerce company. Since we don’t ship outside of the United States, we don’t collect or store this information from non-U.S. residents.
We love hearing from our consumers and we often get emails, messages on social media, snail mail letters and phone calls. When this happens, we may use the personal information that you’ve provided to us in other contexts. But, rest assured, we won’t share your email address with any third parties.
Like most websites, the Vital Farms website does collect usage data, device data and referral data whenever you interact with it from any device. It stores (somewhat boring) stuff like the originating IP address, internet service provider, pages and files viewed, operating system versions, where you came from (such as another website or a link in an email). Why do we do this? To help make our site and your experience better.
We use third party tracking services, like Google Analytics (you may have heard of them), that use cookies and page tags to collect aggregated and anonymized data about visitors to our website. This just means your info is lumped with a bunch of others’ info, so we don’t know who you are specifically. The data includes usage and user statistics. If we send an email to you, we might include page tags, which allow us to understand whether you opened the email and clicked on the links in it. It helps us learn how to improve our email delivery and effectiveness. If you’ve visited one of our ads somewhere else on the web, our advertising partners might add a cookie to your computer to help us know which parts of our site you went to. This helps us make better ads in the future and helps us know what parts of our site are popular. We’re just trying to get better and better!
We are pretty sure you want to keep your information private, so unless you decide to share your info with the online and real world (totally up to you), Vital Farms will not use the info you share with us in any way other than what we tell you here. We won’t sell your info to third parties. We only use the information that we collect from you in order to provide our services to you, such as responding to any contact forms, completing merchandise orders, and providing you with customer support and technical troubleshooting. We may also use your information to follow up with you regarding a transaction.
Internally, we may use your information for a few reasons. First, we like to monitor, maintain and improve our services and features (pretty sure we mentioned that above). As a result, we may perform statistical and other analyses on the info we collect to measure user behavior and trends and understand how people use our page and services, and to monitor, troubleshoot and improve our services, including to help us evaluate and create new features, services or content. We use your info, along with info from all our other customers, to help keep our services secure and operational and for marketing, research and development purposes.
We also use data to enforce our terms of use, prevent potentially illegal activities, respond to legal requests and prevent harm. If we receive a legal request or subpoena, we may need to inspect the data we have to determine our response. (We hope that never happens.)
Sharing or Disclosing Your Data
We recognize that you are trusting us with keeping your information safe and private. That trust is important to us. We only share your information with our select service providers who help us provide our services to you. For example, we use payment processors who help us to process credit card transactions. While we do what we can to protect your information, the internet is not a 100% secure environment (as you probably know), and we cannot guarantee absolute security of the transmission or storage of your information. By using our services, you are saying it’s ok for Vital Farms to have a third party use your info so that we can provide services to you like processing credit card transactions..
The only time we will share your personal information with a third-party is when we have done one of three things, in keeping with applicable law (1) given you notice, such as in this privacy policy (b) gotten the ok from you (express consent), such as through an opt-in or check box; (3) de-identified or aggregated the information (that just means bundled it together) so that individuals or other entities cannot reasonably be identified by it. Where required by law, we will get your express consent prior to sharing or disclosing any personal info.
So, when are some examples of when we may need to share your info?
- If you provide billing information to us that is different from the information the billing contact has, we may share your identity with the billing contact. This would be upon their request and we will usually attempt to notify you of the request ahead of time. By using our services and agreeing to this privacy policy, you’re essentially saying you’re cool with this.
- If the email address you have used in your account set up belongs to or is controlled by an organization (like your work email address), we may disclose that email address to that organization to help it understand who associated with the organization uses Vital Farms. We hope you don’t use your work email address for our services unless you are authorized to do so. If you do, you are agreeing that we can share it with the organization. We’d prefer not to get in the middle of things like this.
- We may lump your info with a bunch of other people’s info and share it with a third party to help improve or promote our services. Don’t worry, you can’t be identified or linked individually to any part of the info we share.
- We may share your information as required or allowed by law or when we believe that sharing is necessary to protect our rights, protect your safety or the safety of others and/or to comply with a judicial proceeding, court order, subpoena or other legal process served on us.
- If Vital Farms Inc. has a change in business ownership or structure or we undertake a corporate reorganization like merger or consolidation or acquisition or any other action or transfer between Vital Farms entities or affiliates, you are agreeing to Vital Farms transferring your information to the new owner or entity so that we (or the new owner) can continue to provide you services.
Your Rights to Your Info
Do you have rights to the information you share with us? Absolutely. You can:
- Update your registration and other account information.
- Access and correct your personal information. If you think we have incorrect information about you, you may have certain legal rights to get that info, access it, correct it, update it or delete it. There are some exceptions to these rights, such as where giving you access would have an unreasonable impact on the privacy of other individuals. Just reach out to our customer support team and we will help you to exercise your rights within a reasonable time if it is appropriate and practical to do so and where required by law.
- Delete your information. Deleting information will not permanently or immediately delete the info. If your data was previously made available to the public through a public link, additional copies of your data may remain available on the Internet even after your account has been deleted.
Generally, we keep your data to comply with our legal obligations, resolve disputes, or enforce our agreements. Data that is deleted from our servers may remain as residual copies on offsite backup media for up to approximately twelve (12) months afterward. If you do not reside in the USA and you contact us, we will periodically delete the information from your contact, because our products and services are not available to you at this time.
What You Should Know About Cookies (We’re not talking about the edible kind)
Cookies are small bits of data we store on the device you use to access our services so we can recognize repeat users. Each cookie expires after a certain period of time, depending on what we use it for.
We may use cookies and page tags or web beacons to collect certain non-personal information about your activities on this and other websites to provide you with targeted advertising on other websites based on your interests. (We may advertise to help make you aware of all the great products Vital Farms has to offer!) We do this with the help of advertising networks and exchanges.
If you purchased something from our website (the merchandise is pretty sweet), when you signed up you created a username and password. Well, we may store your username and password in a cookie to make it quicker for you to sign in whenever you return to buy more things (you’re welcome!) We use these cookies to authenticate your identity (make sure you are you) and confirm whether you are currently logged into our website.
As we mentioned, we use cookies to improve our services by measuring your usage of our website and track referral data as well as possibly display different versions of website content to you (cool, right?) This is all in the name of developing and improving our services and optimizing the content we display to you.
We, or our service providers or other third-parties we work with, may place cookies when you visit our website or when you open emails that we send you, in order to provide you with more tailored marketing content (about our services or other services) and to evaluate whether this content is useful or effective. If you don’t want to receive ads that are tailored to you based on your anonymous online activity, you may “opt out” of many of the companies that are involved in this tailoring by going to http://www.aboutads.info. Opting out this way does not mean you will not receive any ads, it just means that you will no longer receive ads from companies that have been tailoring them to you based on your activities and inferred preferences.
Lastly, we have implemented on our website and other services certain Google Analytics features that support display advertising, including retargeting. But you should know that visitors to our website may opt out of certain types of Google Analytics tracking, customize the Google Display Network ads by using the Google Ads Settings and learn more about how Google serves ads by viewing its Customer Ads Help Center. If you do not wish to participate in Google Analytics, you may download the Google Analytics opt-out browser add-on. You can also learn more about Google’s advertising principals at
https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/1316548?hl=en
You can also choose to remove or disable cookies via your browser. Every browser is different, so refer to your web browser’s configuration document to learn how to do it. But, please note that by removing cookies it may negatively impact your ability to use our services. Using cookies ensures a smoother experience on our website, so you might have a less than optimal one without them.
By using our website and agreeing to this privacy policy, the lawyers say that you expressly consent to the use of cookies as we outlined above in this policy.
Email Policy
Have you heard of the CAN-SPAM Act? Well, it’s a law that sets the rules for commercial email, establishes requirements for commercial messages, gives recipients the right to have emails stopped from being sent to them, and spells out tough penalties for violations. We collect your email address in order to send information, respond to inquiries and other requests or questions.
To be in accordance with CAN SPAM, we agree to:
- Not use false or misleading subjects or email addresses.
- Identify a message as an advertisement in some reasonable way
- Include the physical address of our business or site headquarters (it would be silly not to)
- Monitor third-party email marketing services for compliance, if we use one
- Honor opt-out/unsubscribe requests quickly
- Allow users to unsubscribe by using the link at the bottom of each email
If at any time you want to unsubscribe from receiving future emails, you can follow the instructions at the bottom of each email. We will do our best to quickly remove you from all correspondence.
Children’s Policy
We have a Children’s Policy. You should know that our website is not intended for children under the age of 13. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you are under 13, please do not provide any information on this website and instead go talk to your parents about internet safety.
Other Stuff You Should Know (Policy Changes, Security, and so on)
We might make changes to this policy sometimes. If we do, we will let you know on our website. If these changes are big, we’ll provide you with more prominent notice such as an email or make it a big deal on our website, to ensure you see it. If after we’ve informed you about the changes you still use our services beyond the advance-notice period (that’s just a reasonable amount of time), we will take that to mean you have expressed consent to the changes in our privacy policy. If you disagree with the terms of this privacy policy now or updated in the future, go ahead and let us know at any time.
We already mentioned that we take seriously the security of your personal information and data. You should know, however, that regardless of the security protections and precautions we take, there is always a risk that your personal data may be viewed and used by an unauthorized third party as a result of sharing your data through the internet. If you have any questions about this, again, please give our customer care a call.
We do not process or comply with any web browser’s “do not track” signal or other similar mechanisms that indicate a request to disable online tracking of individual users who visit our website or use our services.
Got Questions?
Go ahead and contact us if you have questions or just want to say “Hi!” Here’s the best way to reach us:
Vital Farms Inc.
3601 S. Congress Ave, Suite C100
Austin, Texas 78704
Last updated: October 4, 2019.
