Households & sharing

Creating your household

A short wizard: name your household, set when you’d like your weekly planning session and inventory-audit reminders, and tell FoodGenie roughly who’s eating — adults and kids, by count.

Set up your household →

Inviting people

One invite, three ways to hand it over — an emailed link, a copyable link, or a QR code all point at the exact same 7-day token underneath. A recipient doesn’t need a FoodGenie account already: the invite page offers “Accept & sign up” right alongside “Already have an account? Sign in to accept,” and it’s bound to the email address it was sent to.

Email
The default — up to 10 addresses per batch, sent via a real email with the invite link (there's also a per-account daily send cap of about 10 invites total).
Share link
A copyable URL for the most recently sent invite — handy for texting someone directly instead of relying on email.
QR code
The same link, as a code to scan — useful in person.
A child, directly
No email, no invite, no login for them — an owner or admin adds a child's profile straight from the household, and fills in their dietary details right after.

Invite someone →

Your household hub & roles

The household hub is your at-a-glance view — who’s in, this week’s plan, and recent activity. The members page underneath handles the actual management: three roles (owner, admin, member) control who can invite people or edit household settings, separate from each person’s life stage (adult, teen, child), which controls what they can actually do — a child can’t plan, shop, or chat with the Genie, for instance.

The household hub, showing the member grid and this week's plan

Owner
The only role that can transfer ownership, cancel a subscription, or (once it works — see below) delete the household.
Admin
Can invite people and edit household settings alongside the owner.
Member
Can plan, cook, shop, manage inventory, import recipes, and chat with the Genie — everything except owner/admin-only settings.

What's shared, what's personal

Most of what makes FoodGenie useful day to day is shared automatically — there’s one plan, one shopping list, one kitchen per household, not a personal copy per person. Your recipe library works the opposite way, on purpose:

Meal plan, shopping list, kitchen inventory
Always shared — every member sees and edits the same one, no toggle to turn that off.
Menus
Shared with your household by default when you create one, but any menu can be flipped to private — visible and editable only by whoever made it.
Your recipe library
Personal by default. A recipe you save stays yours alone until you explicitly share that one recipe (or a whole collection) with your household — nothing is shared in bulk automatically.
Dietary profile & allergens
Each household member's own — a parent or admin fills in a child's from their profile page; adults manage their own from account settings (guide 11).

Dietary signals & the Genie

Chat with the Genie and it already knows your whole household’s allergens and dislikes, aggregated from every member’s profile — not just yours. The automated “plan my week” fill does the same, for the safety-relevant part.

Plan my week now screens every member’s allergens too

The automated “plan my week” fill is screened against the requester’s own dietary profile PLUS the allergens listed on every household member’s profile — the same allergen set an interactive Genie chat weighs in. That’s why its confirmation card reads “planned around your dietary profile and the allergens listed on your household member profiles.” What still stays personal to the requester: dislikes, declared dietary patterns, and skipped cuisines (taste is personal; allergens are safety). And it’s still best-effort either way — some allergens like sulfites or mustard have no detector, guests aren’t covered, and anything missing from a member’s profile can’t be screened automatically, so double-check ingredients yourself too.

Multiple households

You’ll notice the account menu has room for a household switcher — that’s real, forward-built UI, not a mistake. It just has nothing to switch between yet.

Events & RSVP links

Turn a menu into an event from its detail page and you get a shareable link plus a guest-facing RSVP form, roster, and headcount — built specifically so a guest never needs a FoodGenie account to use it.