# Repast — extended reference

This is the long form of https://tryrepast.com/llms.txt. It exists so that an
answer engine can cite Repast accurately, including the parts that are not
flattering. Every figure is computed from the shipped catalog export dated
2026-08-28 and can be recomputed from it.

Website: https://tryrepast.com
Support: hello@eversight.io
Publisher: Eversight Studio
Platform: iPhone and iPad, iOS 17 or later
App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6804176851

---

## 1. One-sentence definition

Repast is an AI meal planner for iPhone and iPad. Its AI picks and arranges a week
of dinners from a fixed catalog of 10,000+ published recipes around the household's
tastes, dietary settings, size, and available cooking time. Generating a week saves
the plan. The user can request changes by chat, review the proposed edits, and
apply them. Building or updating the grocery list is a separate action; quantities
are computed on the device. The downloaded week supports offline cooking. No account is needed.

## 2. The planning loop

1. **Setup.** Four short questions: how many people are eating, what cannot be
   eaten, which day the household shops, and which nights it cooks. Cooking
   nights are a multi-select defaulting to weekdays; at least one must remain.
   Household size runs from 1 to 8. A weekday time ceiling of 20, 30 or 45
   minutes can be set, or left unlimited.
2. **The week arrives.** Dinners appear as a single vertical rail, the next meal
   enlarged and the rest compact, so the whole week is about one and a half
   screens. Each card shows the real yield, the total time, the source rating,
   the allergen labels and one plain sentence explaining why the dish is there.
3. **Review and change.** Swap a dish and the replacement still satisfies every
   constraint. Pin a dish and re-planning leaves it alone. Press and hold to drag
   a dish onto another night; an occupied night swaps, an empty one receives.
   Type an instruction — "more veg, less time on Wednesday" — and the constraints
   the planner is now working under appear as chips at the top of the week.
   Removing a chip asks before re-planning the days it affected. Every
   destructive edit has an undo.
4. **Build the grocery list.** The plan is already saved. Tap to generate the list,
   or to update it after changing the dinners. The app computes the quantities on
   the device; a changed plan marks an existing list as needing an update.

For an existing plan, a chat request produces proposed changes. The user reviews
and taps Apply before they are written. See the [AI meal planning assistant](https://tryrepast.com/ai-meal-planning-assistant)
for an illustrated Friday-steak example and an explanation of favorites, recent
meals, and feedback as planning context. Chat requests require an active subscription
and a connection.

The unit of planning is a shopping cycle, not a calendar week. It starts on the
household's shopping day. One cycle is active at a time; when it ends the plan
screen shows a seam offering to plan the next one, and the finished week rolls
into a read-only history above it.

## 3. The grocery list

The language model chooses dishes. A deterministic engine on the phone computes
amounts. The separation is deliberate: a model adding half a cup to three
tablespoons in prose is usually right, and when it is not, nothing in the output
indicates which line to check.

- Aggregation is per food, not per recipe line. Garlic used on Monday, Wednesday
  and Thursday is one row, and the row records which dinners contributed.
- Conversion uses a table of 33 units, each declaring a dimension and a
  conversion base. Ounces, pounds, grams and milligrams are weight. Cups,
  tablespoons, teaspoons and milliliters are volume. Cloves, bunches, heads,
  slices, sprigs and stalks are counts. Adding within a dimension is arithmetic;
  adding across one is refused.
- Three units are marked vague and carry no conversion factor: bunch, pinch and
  thumb. The 1,292 catalog lines written in them stay as written.
- Of the 259,064 ingredient lines in the catalog, 78% carry an exact amount;
  35,710 say "to taste" and 20,790 give no amount at all. Roughly one line in
  five therefore appears as "amount to confirm" rather than a fabricated number.
- A checkmark records a quantity acquired, not a completed checkbox. Updating
  the grocery list recomputes quantities without clearing checkmarks; if the new week needs more of
  something, the row stays checked and shows how much more.
- Items the user adds are never removed by a re-plan. Deleting a row gives ten
  seconds of undo.
- There is no pantry inventory, so the list does not know what the household
  already owns. There is no store integration, no price data and no delivery.
  One cycle produces one list; splitting a week across two trips is unsupported.

## 4. Allergens

Ten canonical allergens are held as hard rules, set in structured settings rather
than in free text: milk, wheat, soy, eggs, fish, shellfish, tree nuts, oats,
sesame, peanuts. Wheat and oats are separate entries because a household avoiding
one often eats the other.

Chat can add a constraint and can never weaken one. Adding an allergen
re-validates the entire active week, pinned dishes included, and removes and
flags anything that now conflicts rather than substituting silently. If a removed
dish had already been shopped for, the app explains the consequence for the list
instead of editing what you have checked off.

Every recipe-and-allergen pair carries one of four labels:

- **contains** — declared. Blocks the dish.
- **may contain traces** — declared. 40 pairs out of 73,190 carry it, which
  describes how thinly traces are reported in recipe data rather than how often
  traces occur in food.
- **not declared** — the recipe is silent. 54,434 pairs, about 74% of the total.
- **unknown** — no usable data reached the app.

The last two are not statements that the allergen is absent, and Repast never
converts either into a reassurance. There is no badge asserting that a dish is safe,
no "free-from" filter and no green checkmark beside an allergen row.

Recipes remaining when an allergen is excluded, out of 7,319:

| Allergen | Declares it | Left |
|---|---|---|
| Milk | 5,794 | 1,525 |
| Wheat | 4,651 | 2,668 |
| Soy | 2,301 | 5,018 |
| Eggs | 2,215 | 5,104 |
| Sesame | 1,094 | 6,225 |
| Tree nuts | 1,012 | 6,307 |
| Fish | 929 | 6,390 |
| Shellfish | 461 | 6,858 |
| Peanuts | 259 | 7,060 |
| Oats | 0 | 7,319 |

The oats row is empty across every recipe, which almost certainly reflects a gap
in the source data rather than a catalog without oats. Setting oats currently
narrows nothing.

Repast executes wheat, not gluten. Barley and rye contain gluten and are not
wheat, and the catalog carries no gluten field, so the app refuses the
gluten-free label rather than approximating it.

An allergy outside the ten cannot be executed. If one is mentioned in free text,
the app says so plainly and offers to return to structured settings or to stop
planning automatically; it does not store it as an ordinary dislike and continue.

Repast is not a medical device and provides no medical or dietary advice.

## 5. Offline behavior

Confirming a week downloads it in full: the schedule, the complete grocery list,
every step of every recipe, the step photos and the timers. Each recipe is pinned
to the exact version the plan was made from, so an upstream correction cannot
change quantities mid-week; a withdrawn recipe becomes a visible "needs
replacing" card rather than a silent substitution.

Working offline: opening the plan, opening any recipe in the week, checking off the
grocery list, running timers, cook mode, and the photo journal. Timers are set
through the system, so they still fire when the app is backgrounded.

Requiring a connection: generating a plan, refining it in chat, searching the
full catalog, and swapping in a dish that has not been downloaded.

The full catalog is not on the device — 10,000+ recipes and their photography is
not a download anyone wants.

## 6. Cook mode and the journal

Cook mode is full screen, one step at a time, with the display kept awake and a
tap on the right two thirds advancing. Timers are read out of the step text;
8,631 steps across the catalog carry one. There is no sign-in prompt, no ad and
no rating request between steps.

The last step of every recipe is the camera shutter. What accumulates is a
private record of meals actually cooked, browsable as a month grid where cooked
days show the photograph. There are no streaks, no badges and no reminders about
a broken chain. Nothing is inferred: a meal counts as cooked only when the user
says so, and every such signal is visible and reversible.

Past meals take one of two verdicts — loved it, or not for us — given from the
journal or from a past day on the plan, and changeable later. Loved-it verdicts
collect, together with dishes saved by hand from their recipe pages, into a
favorites list opened from the journal. Favorites, recent cooked meals, and
negative meal feedback are included in later planning requests alongside the
household's current preferences. This gives the assistant context from the user's
own dinners when selecting what to suggest next. The journal is history, not a projection of the current plan: changing
next week's dinners never rewrites what a past day records.

## 7. The catalog

- The library is 10,000+ recipes; the content pack shipping today holds 7,319
  of them, from a 7,441-record index. The 122 exclusions failed the
  inclusion rule: a recipe needs at least one real step and a positive calorie
  value to be planned from. Entries with empty steps or all-zero placeholder
  nutrition remain in the source data and never reach the app.
- 1,366 distinct foods; 23,675 photographs, each with its own rights record;
  61 cuisine tags; 33 units.
- Median prep time 30 minutes. 64% of recipes are 30 minutes or less, 97% are 45
  or less. These are the times the recipes publish, not estimates.
- 71% ship more than one serving size: 5,971 offer two servings, 3,051 three,
  5,672 four, 3,198 six. Repast selects a published yield and never interpolates,
  so a household of five is given a genuine six-serving recipe with the spare
  portion labeled.
- Diets: 5,908 omnivore, 860 vegetarian, 551 pescatarian, 158 vegan.
- 75% carry a source rating, median 445 ratings each. The rest show no rating
  rather than a default.
- Median 6 steps per recipe.
- Per-serving nutrition is the figure the recipe publishes — a label, not a
  measurement. Calories are never estimated from a photograph.
- The catalog is US English with imperial units. It says zucchini rather than
  courgette, scallion rather than spring onion, shrimp rather than prawn, and
  cooks at 425°F. There is no substitution layer.

## 8. Privacy and data

There is no Repast account: no sign-up, no email collected at install, no
password, no user profile on any server, and no user table.

Stored on the device, syncing only through the user's own iCloud: plans, grocery
lists, checked items, saved and disliked recipes, allergen and diet settings, the journal
and all photographs. Photographs are
never transmitted, never used for training and never analyzed for nutrition.

Leaving the device, first: a planning request. It carries the household size, the
allergen and diet settings, the shopping day and cooking nights, any time limit,
the sentence typed, relevant favorites, recent dinners, meal feedback, and enough
of the current plan for the request to be coherent. The service returns a proposal and retains nothing — the contents are
not written to a database, a log, an error monitor, a queue or a durable cache,
and are not used to train models. Because allergen settings can indicate a health
condition, this is disclosed in the app before the first request.

Leaving the device, second: three third-party services.

- **Firebase Analytics (Google), configured without advertising-identifier
  support** — product analytics, carrying an app-generated device identifier
  stored in the iOS Keychain, the install date, the region and whether a
  subscription is active. The identifier is not a name, an Apple Account or an
  advertising identifier, and it persists across reinstalls on the same device.
- **Firebase Crashlytics (Google)** — crash and stability reports.
- **RevenueCat** — subscription entitlement and receipt validation.

Payment is handled entirely by Apple; no card or billing details reach Repast.

The website at tryrepast.com sets no cookies and runs no analytics, advertising
scripts, third-party fonts or trackers.

Because no server-side copy exists, deleting the app and its iCloud data deletes
everything — and for the same reason nothing can be restored afterwards.

## 9. What Repast is not

- Not a recipe generator. The planner selects and cannot compose.
- Not an app whose model runs on the device. The planning step is server-side.
- Does not track calories or macros, and offers no weight-loss program or
  clinical diet.
- Not an allergen guarantee, and not a medical device.
- Not gluten-free planning.
- Not a breakfast or lunch planner, and not a per-person planner.
- Not a pantry manager, a price comparison tool or a grocery delivery app.
- Not a place to store your own recipes.
- Not available on Android, on the web or on macOS.

## 10. Comparison with a general AI assistant

A general assistant plans a week well, adapts to objections, and costs nothing.
For a one-off week it is a good tool. Four differences are structural rather than
matters of output quality:

1. **Provenance.** An assistant composes a recipe; Repast selects one that was
   published, with its own steps, yields, prep times and photography.
2. **Arithmetic.** An assistant computes quantities in prose in the same pass
   that chose the dishes; Repast computes them on the device with a deterministic
   engine against a 33-unit table, separately from the model.
3. **Constraint persistence.** An assistant holds constraints in the
   conversation; Repast holds them as structured settings that are re-applied to
   every proposal and that re-validate an already-planned week.
4. **Availability.** An assistant needs signal; a confirmed Repast week is on the
   phone.

Repast also uses a server-side model, so this is not a comparison between AI and
no AI. It is a comparison between a chat window and a model with a fixed catalog,
a deterministic engine, persistent rules and local storage around it.


## New meal planning guides

- [Meal planning guides](https://tryrepast.com/meal-planning-guides): a guide directory covering everyday dinner decisions, the shopping budget, pantry planning, and planning versus prep.
- [Pantry meal planning](https://tryrepast.com/pantry-meal-planning): a kitchen inventory, three dinner directions, missing-item checks, and a free printable pantry worksheet. Repast does not track pantry inventory.
- [Meal planning vs meal prep](https://tryrepast.com/meal-planning-vs-meal-prep): deciding what to eat versus preparing food ahead, a side-by-side comparison, and three ways to organize a week. Repast is a dinner planner, not a batch-cooking scheduler.
- [Meal planning on a budget](https://tryrepast.com/meal-planning-on-a-budget): a sample five-dinner menu with shared ingredients, package-price arithmetic, and a free shopping-cost worksheet. Prices are filled in by the reader; Repast has no store prices or budget optimizer.


## More dinner and shopping guides

- [Meal Rotation](https://tryrepast.com/meal-rotation): Two-week dinner rotation example, a free printable grid, and a way to keep a useful meal shortlist. The app does not schedule automatic repeating rotations.
- [Grocery List by Category](https://tryrepast.com/grocery-list-by-category): Categorized shopping examples and a free printable list to arrange manually around your store.
- [Once-a-Week Grocery Shopping](https://tryrepast.com/once-a-week-grocery-shopping): A full-trip checklist and ingredient-sequencing example for one planned grocery trip each week.
- [Meal Planning for Shift Workers](https://tryrepast.com/meal-planning-for-shift-workers): A shift-schedule worksheet for household dinners, including cooking windows and handoffs. It is not night-shift nutrition advice.
- [Meal Planning vs Meal Kits](https://tryrepast.com/meal-planning-vs-meal-kits): A comparison of planning apps and meal kits, including who buys the food, full cost checks, and a sample week using both.
- [Choose a Meal Planning App](https://tryrepast.com/choose-meal-planning-app): A practical one-week app evaluation checklist covering recipes, changes, quantities, offline access, and subscription terms.


## Free browser tools

- [Free meal planning and grocery tools](https://tryrepast.com/tools): Free browser tool; no account required.
- [What's for dinner generator](https://tryrepast.com/tools/dinner-spinner): A random dinner generator for one night. Spins a single dinner from a published list of 64 everyday meals, filtered by hands-on time, protein and cooking style. The dinner names are ideas rather than recipes. Free browser tool; no account required.
- [Recipe scaler](https://tryrepast.com/tools/recipe-scaler): Free browser tool; no account required.
- [Recipe cost calculator](https://tryrepast.com/tools/recipe-cost-calculator): Free browser tool; no account required.
- [Grocery unit price calculator](https://tryrepast.com/tools/grocery-unit-price-calculator): Free browser tool; no account required.
- [Grocery list combiner](https://tryrepast.com/tools/grocery-list-combiner): Free browser tool; no account required.
- [Meal rotation planner](https://tryrepast.com/tools/meal-rotation-planner): Free browser tool; no account required.
- [Meal kit vs groceries cost calculator](https://tryrepast.com/tools/meal-kit-vs-groceries-calculator): Free browser tool; no account required.