Dinner for a table where everyone eats differently.
The short answer
What can I cook for a group with different allergies and diets?
Make a table in Just Add, add the people you feed and what each of them cannot eat, then ask for dinner as normal. Every plate is built around the union of everyone's allergies — absolute, never averaged — and one vegetarian makes the whole plate vegetarian. Tastes are the only thing that meets in the middle.
How does one plate clear four people?
Making one meal for several people is a studied problem with named strategies. The trick is that it is not one strategy — it is a different one per kind of constraint, and getting that split right is the whole feature.
| What it is | How the table handles it |
|---|---|
| Allergies | The union of everyone's, absolutely. One person's shellfish allergy takes shellfish off the table for four people. It is an exclusion, not a weighting — computed before a word is written and re-checked on the finished answer. |
| Dietary pattern | The strictest one wins. One vegetarian makes the plate vegetarian, or it is built so their portion is. Never “most of us eat meat”. |
| Dislikes | Steered around, softly. A dislike is not an allergy and is never treated as one. It moves the plate away from something without forbidding it — unless someone marked it as a never. |
| Tastes and loves | Averaged. The one place a group genuinely meets in the middle: what everyone likes, pulled together into a plate that pleases all of you a little. |
What most households do instead is hold every constraint in one person’s head and decide from there. That is not a neutral baseline — it is the thing that wears that person out.
Try it: sit someone down
Tuesday table — tap anyone to sit them down
Tonight’s plate is built around
One plate, and it clears everyone. Nobody at this table has to be the problem.
Every switch widens the brief the plate is written against — before it is written, and again after.
What a table actually is
The allergy list is never a judgement call
Everyone's allergens are combined and stripped out before the plate is written, then the finished answer is read again and thrown away if anything slipped through. This is the one bug that can physically hurt someone, so it is the most heavily tested thing in the app.
Constraints are read live, never copied
A table holds who is eating, not a snapshot of what they can eat. If someone adds an allergy in their own settings this afternoon, tonight's dinner is safe without anybody remembering to update anything.
Joining is a scan, not a form
Show the code across the table and they are in. It rotates while it is on screen and dies when you close it, so a photo taken from the other end of the table is worth nothing afterwards.
Nobody's eating is on display
There is no feed, no friend list and no pooled history. The table's cookbook is what the table made together — never a merge of what its members ate on their own.
It describes the food, never the people
The hardest thing to get right in a shared kitchen is not the cooking. It is that somebody has to be the one whose allergy narrows dinner — and a screen that says so out loud makes that person the problem at their own table.
So the line is drawn at the food. “Three of you like fish” is fine. “Sam is the most restrictive” is not, and neither is “Ana has cooked four times this month”. There is no scoreboard, no count of who has helped, and nothing that shows who has not turned up.
The same test the whole product uses: does it describe the food, or the person?
What about the plate you already made?
A table plate is still a plate, so everything else still applies: swap any part of it for free, ask for something different in your own words, or go back to the version you preferred. Each of those is a whole new answer, checked from scratch against the table as it stands right now.
That last part matters more than it sounds. If somebody adds an allergy after a plate was made, that plate is no longer safe for them to be shown — so it is checked again when they open it, and withheld rather than quietly served.
Questions about cooking for other people
Allergies, invites, and the thing a shared kitchen app must never do.
Work from the union rather than the majority. Combine every allergy at the table into one exclusion list, remove all of it before you decide what the meal is, and then build around what is left. Just Add does exactly that: allergies are absolute and never averaged, dietary patterns resolve to the strictest one at the table, and only tastes meet in the middle.
It says so. A vegan, a coeliac and a child who will not eat sauce is a genuinely narrow brief and the honest answer is to name that, offer the closest thing it can build, and let you decide — rather than quietly producing a worse plate and presenting it as a good one.
Yes, and that is a deliberate trade. Constraints are read from each person's own profile rather than typed in on their behalf, which means there is one source of truth for the field where a stale value can hurt someone, and nobody has their food data recorded by somebody else. The invite is a link or a QR code and it lands them on a plate, not a signup form.
No, and it never will. The dashboard describes the food, never the people — “three of you like fish”, “this one works around gluten”. There is no ranking of who is hardest to cook for, no tally of who has cooked and nothing showing who has not joined. A constraint should never make somebody the problem at their own table.
That is the point of it. A plate is a decision in a shareable form, so what the other person receives is a dinner someone already decided rather than a job with your name on it. The research on invisible household labour is clear that sharing the deciding is what helps; sharing only the chore does not.
No. A table is a set of people you feed and the constraints that come with them — no messages, no feed, no friend graph and no presence. Turns land on the plate; nobody watches anybody deliberate over dinner in real time.
Dinner, sorted in about a second
Out now on iPhone, and free forever for a real daily allowance of meals, every way in and every situation — nobody is ever locked out of working out what to have tonight.