Help & how-to

How to use KalaPlate

Short, plain answers for the things you'll actually want to do — from your first setup to importing that recipe you saved two years ago. Everything here matches how the app behaves; where safety is involved, we say it straight.

Getting started Your household Planning a week Recipes & imports Shopping list Tracking & plates Account

Getting started

The whole idea is to set up once, then let KalaPlate carry the weekly thinking. Ten minutes now saves you the nightly "what's for dinner?" later.

What do I need before I start?

Just a sense of who eats in your household and any allergies or diets that matter. You don't need to know recipes, macros or a budget to begin — you can add all of that later, and the questionnaire stays editable forever.

  1. Create your account on the web or mobile app — they share the same data.
  2. Add the people who eat regularly (you can add away days and guests later).
  3. Flag any allergies and hard "won't eat" rules. These are treated as law.
  4. Plan your first week in Flexible mode — the simplest place to start.
Our tip for week one: keep it simple with the Flexible plan. It's a set of meals to cook whenever — a mental reset while you learn the app.
Web app or mobile app — which should I use?

Both, whenever suits. They share one account and one set of data, so a plan you build on the web is on your phone at the shops, and a recipe you import on your phone is there on the couch. Plan wherever you have a keyboard; shop wherever you have your pocket.

Your household

Everyone eats differently, so the plan is built around real people, not one generic eater.

How do I add each person's needs?

Open Household and add a profile per person. Each one can carry allergies, personal won't-eats, dietary restrictions, kid portion style (picky, good or adult), and school notes like nut-free or canteen days.

A dislike is not an allergy. If one person hates olives, that's a soft steer — the dish can still be cooked for everyone else, with a note to leave olives off that plate. An allergy, by contrast, removes the ingredient from the whole plan.

Allergies are enforced, not filtered. Every member's allergies, plus household never-include and protein-exclusion lists, collapse into one forbidden set. It's checked when the menu is generated, again when a meal is selected, and once more before your plan is built. The matching is deliberately over-cautious — a false alarm just costs a retry. Always read labels yourself; KalaPlate is a planning tool, not a medical device.
Someone's away this week — how do I handle it?

Set their away days on the plan (for example, "Rafa's away Wed–Sun"). The serves shrink automatically for those nights, so you cook for who's actually home and don't over-cater. Kid portions count fractionally, so a household of two adults and two small kids isn't planned as four adult serves.

Planning a week

You approve a menu before any recipes are written — you're never handed a week you didn't choose.

Which planning style should I pick?
  • Keep it flexible — a balanced week you swap freely as you go. Best for a busy or unpredictable week.
  • Hit my macros — plans built against each person's protein / carb targets, with a plate guide on every shared dinner.

Two tick boxes bend either style to the week you're having. I'm feeling adventurous sits inside the flexible style: we reach for KalaPlate's library before your own saved dishes, and lean toward cuisines and proteins you haven't had for a while. I know which nights we're eating in works with either style — pick the days and each meal lands on one of them.

You can switch styles any week. The same household swings between committed and flexible, and that's expected — not a failure.

What is the "confirm gate"?

Before writing full recipes, KalaPlate proposes a menu of titles with one-liners. Swap out anything that doesn't appeal, then confirm. Only the menu you approve gets written into full recipes. It means no wasted week and no surprise dinners.

How do I stop cooking the same six things?

KalaPlate already applies a hard eight-week no-repeat on dinners and scores against repeating a protein or cuisine within the same week. To pull in your own favourites, use Pin to next plan — flag a saved recipe and it's included in the next build, then the flag clears itself so you don't double up.

Recipes & imports

Every recipe — generated, imported or from the library — becomes the same Recipe Flow format, so you never lose your place.

How does Recipe Flow work while I'm cooking?

Recipe Flow lays a recipe out as a timeline of steps. Ingredients are clustered with the step that uses them, headings tell you where the step happens ("In the pan", "On the tray"), and you tick each step off as you go. A serves stepper rescales the quantities live — bump it to five and the numbers follow.

It's designed for flour-on-your-hands cooking: big tick targets, no scrolling back to find which onion goes where.
Can I bring in a recipe from a website or a photo?

Yes. Paste a URL or add a photo and KalaPlate converts it into Recipe Flow. Imported recipes are clearly badged "Imported", and the original source link is kept and shown. Save it to your favourites or "keen to try" list and it can rotate into future plans — so that recipe you saved two years ago finally gets cooked.

What are favourites and "keen to try"?

Two lists you build as you go. Save from a plan, an import or the Greatest Plates library, then group and filter by meal type, protein or cuisine. "Keen to try" is your someday shelf; favourites are the dishes you already know work.

Shopping list

The plan becomes one list, built to survive the supermarket.

How is the shopping list built?

From the plan's structured ingredients — quantities added up across every recipe, then grouped by store and by fridge, fresh and pantry. It stays checkable while you shop: tick what's in the trolley, and tick "already have it" before you leave home so it drops off the list.

Can I sort the list by where I actually shop?

Yes. Set your store preferences — Woolworths, Coles, Aldi, Costco, farmer's market or other — and your go-to ingredients are remembered. Pick a store on any list and it saves back, so next time everything for the greengrocer is grouped together, everything for the supermarket together.

What are staples and "every now and then"?

Staples are every-week items that ride every list automatically. One-off "this week" ticks clear themselves after the shop. Everything else — bin bags, shampoo, dog food — waits quietly under "Every now and then", because you'll know whether you need it at the cupboard, not now.

Tracking & plate guides

One pot, different plates. Track without cooking separately, and without manual data entry.

What does the plate ring mean?

The ring is a plate seen from above. With real macro data it shows the actual energy split — clay for protein, blue for carbs, gold for fat. Without trustworthy numbers it falls back to a plain reading (balanced, add greens, greens), and a treat night wears a quiet oat ring — no judgement. When even a category would be a guess, no ring is drawn. Honest numbers, or none.

How do per-person plate guides work?

On a shared dinner, anyone tracking gets their own serve guide on the same meal — "about 1¼ serves: roughly 140 g of the beef and 190 g of the rice." Nobody cooks or eats a separate meal; the numbers just tell each person how much of the shared pot is theirs.

Do I have to log every ingredient?

No — that's the point. Log a meal straight off the week's menu by serve size, add an extra snack or a different breakfast, all per person. You only enter ingredients manually if you want to. Tracking is approximate by design: get close to your goals and live your life. Approximate tracking beats no tracking.

Account & settings

Life changes; your settings keep up.

Can I change my household after setup?

Any time. The full questionnaire — members, allergies, diets, kid settings, equipment, budget, protein-per-meal preference and planning style — is permanently editable. Add a new baby, drop a diet, change your stores; the next plan reflects it.

What languages are supported?

English is live now, with Portuguese and Spanish staged behind review.

How do I delete my account?

In the app: open Settings, tap Delete account, enter your password and type DELETE. On the web: sign in, open Account, scroll to Delete account, and do the same. Either way it takes effect immediately and cannot be undone.

If you can't sign in, try resetting your password first; if that doesn't work, email us and we'll handle it. The full picture — exactly what is deleted, what remains afterwards, and the request path when you're locked out — is on the account deletion page.

What data does KalaPlate hold about my household?

Your account email, everything you've told us about the people who eat with you — names, allergies, dietary restrictions, and any body, goal or macro figures you've filled in — your plans, favourites, shopping regulars and daily tracker entries.

The privacy policy sets out all of it in a table, along with which service providers see what, what happens to photos you send, how long we keep things, and the handful of records that survive deleting your account.

Someone shared a recipe I didn't want. What can I do?

Two things, and both are on the share itself — in your inbox on Favourites on the website, or on the Favourites tab in the app.

Report it. Pick a reason and send it. That works whether the share is still waiting, already accepted or already dismissed — reporting it isn't something you can lose by tidying your inbox first — and reporting doesn't change the share, so it stays where it is until you deal with it.

Block the sender. This takes effect straight away and doesn't wait for us: that account can't send you anything again, anything of theirs still sitting in your inbox goes, and they aren't told. Undo it any time from Account.

Reports come to us and we look at them and act as soon as we reasonably can, safety first — we don't quote a fixed number of hours, because we'd rather tell you what actually happens. For anything urgent, email support@kalaplate.com — a person reads it, and it's the fastest route. The full policy is under reporting and blocking in the terms.

Nobody can reach you in KalaPlate unless they already know your email address. There's no feed, no profile, no search for people and no message field.

How do I contact a human?

Email support@kalaplate.com. That address takes support questions, privacy requests, account-deletion requests and reports of anything that looks wrong.

If you're writing about something that went wrong in the app, tell us roughly when it happened and what you were doing — it makes the logs findable.