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.
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.
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.
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.
Everyone eats differently, so the plan is built around real people, not one generic eater.
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.
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.
You approve a menu before any recipes are written — you're never handed a week you didn't choose.
You can switch modes any week. The same household swings between committed and flexible, and that's expected — not a failure.
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.
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.
Every recipe — generated, imported or from the library — becomes the same Recipe Flow format, so you never lose your place.
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.
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.
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.
The plan becomes one list, built to survive the supermarket.
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.
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.
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.
One pot, different plates. Track without cooking separately, and without manual data entry.
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.
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.
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.
Life changes; your settings keep up.
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.
English is live now, with Portuguese and Spanish staged behind review.