Family Meal Planner: One Menu, a Portion for Each Person

A typical meal plan is written for a single adult. Put two adults and two children at the same table and the numbers stop fitting: a teenager and a woman who is losing weight can differ by about a thousand calories a day, and a young child eats a fraction of what an adult does. Cooking four separate meals is not realistic, and serving everyone the same plate leaves some people hungry and others over their target.

The household planner takes the middle path that cooks use anyway: one menu, cooked once, with a different amount on each plate.

In the app you open Profile, then Household, and add the people you cook for. Your own details come from your profile. Every other adult gets the same fields: age, sex, height, weight, activity and goal, plus an optional calorie or protein override. A child is added by age band only (2 to 3, 4 to 8, 9 to 13 or 14 to 17), with an optional sex, and no weight or goal. Each person also gets toggles for the meals they eat from the plan.

Take two adults and two children. Adult B is a 36-year-old man, 182 cm and 84 kg, moderately active, maintaining weight. Adult A is a 34-year-old woman, 168 cm and 64 kg, lightly active, losing weight. The children are in the 9 to 13 band (a girl) and the 4 to 8 band (a boy). Dinner is chicken, rice and broccoli with a little olive oil. The shared dish is built for the mean of the four dinner targets, 672 kcal, and then each person's plate is scaled.

Each person's day is split into meals by fixed shares: breakfast 30 %, lunch 35 % and dinner 35 % of the day, and every snack takes 10 % from the main meals. A person's portion of a shared dish is their calorie target for that meal divided by the calories the shared dish was built for, held between 0.4 and 2.2 times the base. That cap is why a toddler never gets a portion that is too tiny to be sensible and an athlete never gets one that is absurdly large.

The same calculation scales the shopping list. It counts only the people who eat each meal, so skipping lunch for one person changes the list.

Allergies are handled as a rule for the whole table: if anyone has a strict allergy, no dish on the menu contains it, so nobody needs a separate plate. Preferences such as vegetarian, halal or low-carb are handled per person, by an adapted version of a dish where the base conflicts. If no safe adapted version can be made, the dish is not served to that person and the sides are sized for them instead, with a warning on the plan.

The household size depends on the plan. The count includes you. A downgraded account keeps its saved household plans for viewing but cannot add people beyond the new limit. There is also a "For the family" preset in the plan generator that simply makes N identical portions, with no per-person sizing. It is not tied to a paid tier, and it uses your normal plan-generation allowance.

A household plan is general nutrition information. It does not replace a doctor or dietitian, and it is not a treatment for any condition. Child values are population reference figures with no calorie restriction, and they are not a growth assessment. The diary logs only the account owner's portion. Household plans are private and cannot be shared by link. Everyone you add is someone whose data you are entering, so add only people you may enter, and for a child only as a parent or guardian.