Getting started
Allergens & dietary needs
Some food preferences are flexible, and some are not. Forkboard keeps the two apart: allergens are a hard line every plan respects, and dietary patterns shape what shows up on the board. You can set both during onboarding, and change either one any time in Preferences.
Allergens are a hard line
A flagged allergen never appears in a generated plan — and that is not just the model being careful. A deterministic server check filters every dinner before it reaches your board, so the constraint holds no matter what. Allergens are never tied to your plan tier; they are honored on every dinner, on every plan, always.
- Open Preferences (Settings, then Preferences on the web; the Preferences screen on the iPhone), or set these during onboarding under "Allergens to avoid."
- Find the Allergens section.
- Tap any chip to flag it: tree-nut, peanut, shellfish, fish, egg, soy, sesame, dairy, or gluten.
- Your choice saves on its own — there is no Save button.
Those nine are the canonical set Forkboard can enforce. Common names map to them automatically — nuts becomes tree-nut, milk becomes dairy, wheat becomes gluten — but anything outside the nine is dropped rather than half-enforced. If a food is a hard no but isn't on the list, see the next section.
For a strict no-go that isn't one of the nine allergens, use "Things to avoid." It is freeform and lowercased, and the plan strongly avoids whatever you list — but it is a strong preference, not the deterministic safety guarantee that allergens get.
Dietary patterns
Dietary patterns shape the kind of cooking the board plans around. Tap any that apply in the Dietary patterns section of Preferences (also offered during onboarding); leave it empty if none do.
- vegetarian
- vegan
- pescatarian
- gluten-free
- dairy-free
- kosher
- halal
In a household
Allergens and dietary patterns belong to each person, not the kitchen. On a Family household every member's allergens are honored on every dinner, and everyone's diets are respected together — the plan aims for shared meals that work for the strictest needs at the table. Each person sets their own; nobody inherits a shared profile.
Still stuck? Email hello@forkboard.app.