Family meal planning that uses real serving sizes
The quiet failure in most family meal planning tools is arithmetic. Ask for five servings and you get a four-serving recipe multiplied by 1.25, which means 1.25 onions, 0.75 of a tin and a grocery list nobody can shop. Repast picks a serving size the recipe was actually published with, and tells you when that leaves a portion over.
What the catalog can serve
Every figure below is the count of recipes that ship with that exact yield, not a count of what could be scaled to it.
Why the extra portion is labeled instead of hidden
A household of five cooking a six-serving recipe has one portion spare. That is a fact about tomorrow’s lunch, so the card says it: the yield, and a note that there is one more serving than there are people. The alternative is a plan that appears to fit perfectly and quietly leaves food unaccounted for every night of the week.
The same honesty applies downward. If the only published yields are two and four, a household of three is given four servings and told so, rather than shown a three-serving recipe that does not exist.
Time is a household constraint too
Setup asks for a weekday ceiling — 20, 30, 45 minutes, or no limit. It is enforced against the recipe’s published prep time, so the ceiling is real rather than advisory. 64% of the catalog fits inside 30 minutes and 97% inside 45, which is why the 30-minute setting still leaves a usable pool and a 20-minute one is genuinely tight.
When a night cannot be filled inside the ceiling, the slot is left open with the specific relaxation that would fill it, including how many more dishes it would unlock. Nothing is quietly slipped past the limit.
What changes when someone in the house cannot eat something
Allergen settings are household-wide and are applied before anything is proposed, so a nut-free household never sees a dish that declares tree nuts, on any night, including the ones proposed later in a chat. This narrows the pool considerably and the page on how allergens are handled gives the exact numbers, along with the two labels that do not mean what people assume they mean.
Diets are set the same way. The catalog carries 860 vegetarian, 551 pescatarian and 158 vegan recipes, so a vegan household is planning from a genuinely small pool. That is worth knowing before you rely on it, and it is the sort of number an app has every incentive not to print.
The part that has nothing to do with planning
The last step of every recipe is the camera. Over a few months what accumulates is a record of what the household actually ate, browsable by month, with the dishes people liked marked as such. There are no streaks and no reminders about a chain you have broken, because a food app that makes a family feel behind has misunderstood its job.
Family planning questions
What AI app plans dinners for a family?
Repast plans one dinner a night for a household of one to eight, from a plain-language description rather than a form. Allergen and diet rules are set once for the whole household and applied before anything is proposed.
How does it handle a household of five?
It gives you a real six-serving recipe and labels the extra portion, rather than a fabricated five-serving one. Recipes ship with the yields their source actually published — 5,971 offer a two-serving version, 5,672 a four and 3,198 a six — and Repast picks from that list. Dividing a four-serving recipe by four and multiplying by five produces quantities nobody has ever cooked, and it is where scaled grocery lists start going wrong.
Can I plan dinner for a family without cooking every night?
Yes, and it is the default. Setup asks which nights you cook and pre-selects weekdays; you can take any of them out as long as one remains. Nights you are not cooking stay in the week as nights you are not cooking, so the plan matches the household rather than an idealised version of it.
What about a picky eater who will not eat what everyone else is having?
Repast plans one dinner a night for the whole table, and it learns what your household turns down. Mark a dish not for us and that signal is explicit, visible in settings and reversible, so the rotation moves toward what people actually eat. Allergens are stronger still: they are hard rules the planner cannot break.
How many people can it plan for?
From 1 to 8. Above eight the catalog stops having genuine published yields to draw on, and the honest options are to interpolate quantities or to stop — so it stops.
Will it keep suggesting the same family dinners?
The catalog spans 61 cuisines across 10,000+ recipes, and the planner does not repeat a dish inside a cycle. Over months the pool that matters is the one left after your constraints are applied, which is why the allergen and time settings do more to determine variety than the catalog size does.
Dinner for the actual household
Real serving sizes, the nights you actually cook, and one list for the shop — for two people or for eight.
No account to create. iOS 17 or later.