An allergy meal planner that holds your rules
Set them once and the planner works inside them every time — in the first week, and in every change you ask for afterwards. Chat can add a rule; it can never weaken one. Here are the ten, the four labels a dish can carry, and how much of the menu is still open once you rule one out.
- Contains
The recipe declares the allergen. If it is one of yours, the planner will not put the dish in your week.
- May contain traces
A traces declaration exists. It is the rarest label in the catalog by a wide margin — 40 of the 73,190 recipe-allergen pairs carry it.
- Not declared
The recipe says nothing about this allergen. That is not the same as saying it is absent, and Repast will not round it up to safe.
- Unknown
No usable data reached the app for this pair. Same rule: unknown stays unknown, and the label says so on the dish.
The ten
These are set once, in structured settings rather than in a sentence, and they are the only constraints in Repast enforced as rules the planner cannot break.
- milk
- wheat
- soy
- eggs
- fish
- shellfish
- tree nuts
- oats
- sesame
- peanuts
Wheat and oats are separate entries rather than a single cereals row, because a household that avoids one very often eats the other. The list is fixed: an allergen outside it cannot be enforced, and Repast says so instead of accepting it and continuing.
How much is still on the menu
Rule out an allergen and the planner simply stops offering the dishes that declare it. The right-hand column is what it plans from instead — counted across the recipes in the content pack shipping today.
| Allergen | Recipes that declare it | Recipes left | Share of catalog left |
|---|---|---|---|
| Milk | 5,794 | 1,525 | 21% |
| Wheat | 4,651 | 2,668 | 36% |
| Soy | 2,301 | 5,018 | 69% |
| Eggs | 2,215 | 5,104 | 70% |
| Sesame | 1,094 | 6,225 | 85% |
| Tree nuts | 1,012 | 6,307 | 86% |
| Fish | 929 | 6,390 | 87% |
| Shellfish | 461 | 6,858 | 94% |
| Peanuts | 259 | 7,060 | 96% |
| Oats | 0 | 7,319 | 100% |
The four labels, and the two that are not a green light
Every dish shows what is actually known for each of your allergens. Contains is a declaration and blocks the dish. May contain traces is also a declaration, and it is vanishingly rare: 40 pairs out of 73,190 carry it, which tells you far more about how thinly traces are reported in recipe data than about how often traces occur in food.
Not declared and unknown are the two that people read as safe, and they are not. They mean the recipe is silent and that no usable data reached the app. Repast keeps them visually distinct — the second gets the dashed ring the app reserves for absence — and never converts either into a reassurance.
That is why there is no green checkmark beside an allergen row. A checkmark would be a promise about the food itself; what Repast can tell you is exactly what the recipe declares, on every dish, every time. Check the packaging on what you buy, and the two together are a far shorter job than reading every label in the aisle.
What happens when the rules change
Adding an allergen triggers a full re-validation of the active week. Every dish is re-checked, pinned ones included, and any that now conflict are removed from the plan and marked so you can see what happened. If a removed dish had already been shopped for, the app tells you what that means for the grocery list rather than editing your ticks behind your back.
The same machinery runs when a recipe is withdrawn upstream. A dish can disappear from the catalog after you have planned it; when that happens the card degrades into a “needs replacing” state rather than vanishing, so the week never silently changes shape between two glances at it.
Where this stops
Repast is not a medical device and gives no medical or dietary advice. It cannot see your kitchen, your shopping or the package in your hand, and cross-contamination in a factory or a pan is entirely outside what any recipe field can describe. It has no knowledge of intolerance thresholds, and it will not tell you an amount is small enough to be fine.
If someone in your household has a severe allergy, the useful framing is that Repast removes the dishes that openly declare the allergen so you spend your attention on the ones that say nothing. That is a genuine reduction in work. It is not a guarantee, and this page will not be edited later to imply that it is.
Related: how household size and diets work and what the catalog contains.
Allergen questions
Is there a meal planning app that handles a nut allergy?
Repast holds ten allergens as hard rules: milk, wheat, soy, eggs, fish, shellfish, tree nuts, oats, sesame, peanuts. Set tree nuts and peanuts and no dish declaring them is proposed, in the first plan or in any later change you ask for. The great majority of the catalog does not declare tree nuts at all. What that sentence does not say is that they are free of tree nuts — only that the recipe does not state otherwise, and the difference matters most to exactly the people asking this question.
What does not declared actually mean?
It means the recipe says nothing about that allergen. It is by far the most common label in the catalog: of the 73,190 recipe-and-allergen pairs, 54,434 — about 74% — carry it. Repast displays it as its own state rather than folding it into "safe", because folding it in is the single decision that would make the app dangerous.
Can the AI be talked out of an allergen rule?
No. Allergens are structured settings, and the chat can only add constraints, never weaken one. Asking the planner for something that breaks a rule you have set gets you a refusal and an explanation, not a dish. The rule also outranks a pinned dish: adding an allergy re-checks the entire active week, pinned meals included.
What happens if I add an allergy mid-week?
The current week is re-validated immediately. Anything that now breaks the rule is pulled out of the plan and flagged, including dishes you pinned and dishes you have already shopped for. Repast will not silently substitute a replacement, because a silent swap means a person stops knowing what is in their week — and if you have already bought for the original dish, the app says what that means for the list rather than quietly editing it.
Can I use it for a severe allergy?
Repast filters every proposal against the allergen data published with each recipe, which does most of the work of narrowing a catalog down to what your household can eat. It is not a medical device and gives no medical advice, and no app can see the package in your hand — so for a severe allergy, treat it as the filter that gets you to a short list, and check the packaging on what you buy.
Does it support gluten-free planning?
It executes wheat, not gluten. Those are not the same constraint: barley and rye contain gluten and are not wheat, and the catalog does not carry a gluten field to filter on. Repast therefore refuses the gluten-free label rather than approximating it with the wheat rule and letting the name imply a guarantee it cannot make.
What if my allergy is not one of the ten?
Say so in the free-text description and Repast tells you plainly that it cannot execute that constraint safely, then offers to take you back to the structured settings or to stop planning automatically. It will not quietly store an unexecutable allergy as an ordinary dislike and keep generating weeks as though it had been handled.
Rules, not preferences
Ten allergens the planner cannot override, four labels shown honestly, and the underlying data published rather than summarized.
No account to create. iOS 17 or later.