1. How Foodcrew works

Foodcrew turns a group trip into a food plan: who's coming to which meal, what you'll eat, who cooks it, what to buy, and who owes whom at the end.

There are two roles:

The organizer creates the trip and owns it. They can edit everything and are the only person who needs a paid plan.
Participants join with a link. They fill in their own preferences and attendance, and can claim shopping items and add expenses. Participants are always free — they never need an account upgrade.

The organizer can hand out specific powers to participants (see Share the workload), so you don't have to do it all yourself.

Everything updates live. If two people have the trip open, a change one makes appears on the other's screen without a refresh.

2. Create your trip

From your dashboard, choose New trip and fill in:

Name and destination — whatever the group calls it.
Start and end dates — these define the days you'll plan meals for. The start date can't be in the past.
Trip type — trekking, sailing, camping, cycling, ski, retreat, road trip, house rental or other. This shapes the AI's meal suggestions.
Group size estimate — a rough head count before people have joined.
Currency — used for every expense on the trip.
Meals to plan — tick lunch and/or dinner, and for each one pick the courses you want to plan: starter, main course, dessert. Most groups plan just the main course; tick the extras only if you really intend to plan them, or you'll be staring at a lot of empty slots.
Constraints — no fridge, limited stove, boat galley, shared kitchen, dry food only, weight limit, limited water. These are passed to the AI so it doesn't suggest a soufflé for a mountain hut.

Once the trip exists, Edit trip adds two more settings worth knowing:

Meal complexity — simple, standard or elaborate. Tells the AI how ambitious to be.
AI guidance — a free-text note (up to 1000 characters) applied to every suggestion, e.g. "Mediterranean food, nothing spicy, we have a bread machine."

You can also upload a cover photo for the trip.

3. Invite your crew

Open Invite crew and copy the join link. Anyone with the link can join the trip — send it by message, email, or however your group talks.

On the same page you'll see how many people have filled in their preferences. On the trip overview, Remind pending emails everyone who hasn't responded yet. Anyone already reminded in the last 24 hours is skipped, so you can't accidentally spam the group.

4. Everyone fills in their preferences

This is the step that makes the rest work, and it's the one participants actually do. Each person opens Preferences on the trip and fills in:

Their details — display name, phone, email, arrival and departure times, and appetite (small, normal, big). Appetite feeds into quantities.
Cooking availability — whether they can cook at all, the minimum, preferred and maximum number of turns they want, their confidence level (beginner, intermediate, confident), whether they'll act as backup, and any notes. They can also tick specific meals they can't cook — the evening they arrive late, for instance.
Companions — extra adults, kids and babies coming with them who don't have their own account. They count towards quantities.
Allergies and dietary restrictions — comma-separated, e.g. "peanuts, shellfish" and "vegetarian, halal, gluten-free". These are the ones that matter; they're shown to whoever is cooking.
Dislikes — the softer list, e.g. "olives, cilantro".
Breakfast, dessert and drinks — coffee and milk type, plus checkboxes for what they actually eat and drink.
Notes — free text for lunch, dinner, snacks and anything else.
Attendance — a tick per day and per meal. Everyone is assumed to be attending everything, so people only need to untick the meals they'll miss. This drives portion counts and stops the cooking rota assigning someone a dinner they aren't there for.

Preferences can be changed any time up until the trip starts.

5. Plan the meals

The Meal plan page is a grid: one card per day, split by meal type, then by course. Each slot is either empty or holds a dish.

To fill a slot you can:

Add — type a title and notes yourself.
Suggest — let the AI propose a dish for that slot, taking into account the trip type, constraints, complexity, your AI guidance, and the group's allergies and restrictions. Don't like it? Replace generates another.
Suggest all — fill every empty slot in one go.

Open a meal to edit it and you also get:

Ingredients — add them by hand (name, quantity, unit, category) or hit Generate ingredients to have the AI work out the list, scaled to the number of people actually attending that meal.
Recipe — generate step-by-step instructions for whoever ends up cooking, and regenerate if you want a different take.

Generate all details does ingredients and recipes for every planned meal at once. It runs in the background, so you can carry on working while it fills in.

Watch for two badges: no one attending means everyone has unticked that meal, and an ingredient count confirms a meal is ready to feed the shopping list.

You can duplicate a meal onto another slot, delete individual meals, or reset the whole plan and start over.

6. Set the cooking rota

Generate schedule assigns a cook — and where possible a backup — to every planned meal. It only ever picks people who said they can cook, and it skips anyone who:

has hit the maximum number of turns they asked for,
marked that specific meal as one they can't cook,
or isn't attending that meal.

Among everyone eligible, it picks whoever has the fewest turns so far, breaking ties in favour of the more confident cook. Backups come from the people who ticked "can be backup". The result is a rota that spreads the load rather than leaning on the same two people.

You can override any assignment by hand. Lock a duty you're happy with and regenerating won't touch it — locked turns still count towards that person's load, so the rest of the rota balances around them.

Duties show warnings when something doesn't add up: no available cook (nobody eligible for that meal), over-assigned (someone is past their limit), and outside window (assigned outside their arrival and departure times).

The Summary panel shows how many turns each person has, their dietary information, and how many meals are still unassigned.

7. Build the shopping list

Generate list rolls every meal's ingredients into one categorized shopping list. You need at least one meal with ingredients first — generate those on the meal plan page.

The list is smarter than a straight concatenation:

The same ingredient across several meals is merged into one line.
Units are converted and combined, so 800 g from one meal and 1 kg from another become a single 1.8 kg entry rather than two lines.
Each item lists which meals it came from — expand from meals to see them.

You can also Add item one at a time, or use Bulk add to paste in a whole category at once — pick a category, tap the common suggestions, and type the rest one per line. This is how you get the things no recipe mentions: bin bags, foil, coffee, washing-up liquid.

While shopping, anyone can claim an item to say they'll buy it, and mark it purchased when it's in the trolley. With several people in different aisles, that's what stops you coming home with three bags of rice.

Lock an item to protect it from regeneration. Regenerating refreshes quantities on unlocked items but keeps who claimed what and what's already been bought, and never touches locked items or anything you added by hand.

8. Track spending and settle up

Add an expense with its amount, category (groceries, market, drinks, fuel, supplies, other), date, who paid, and a description. Attach a photo or PDF of the receipt if you want a record.

Then choose how it splits:

Between participants — tick who shares it, and optionally give people a weight if they should carry more or less than an even share.
By attendance — pick a specific meal and it splits across exactly the people who were down to eat it. The right choice for a dinner half the group skipped.
Organizer paid — recorded but not split.

Foodcrew keeps a running balance per person and works out the suggested reimbursements — the smallest set of payments that squares everyone up. When someone pays you back, record it and mark it paid.

Unlike the rest of the trip, expenses and settlements stay editable during and after the trip. That's the point: you spend the money while you're there, and settle up on the way home.

9. Share the workload

The organizer holds every permission automatically. To share, open the participant list on the trip overview, click the manage icon next to someone's name, and grant any of:

Manage meals — plan and edit the meal plan, including AI suggestions.
Manage cooking schedule — generate and adjust the rota.
Manage shopping list — generate, add and edit items.
Manage participants — invite people and hand out permissions.

Anyone on the trip can already claim shopping items, mark them purchased, add expenses and record reimbursements — those never need a permission.

10. What changes when the trip starts

Once the start date arrives, the plan freezes. Meals, the cooking rota, the shopping list, participants and preferences all become read-only — so nobody rewrites the plan from a campsite while five people are already shopping against it.

Three things stay available:

reading everything — the whole plan is still there on your phone,
expenses and settlements, which you'll be adding as you go,
deleting the trip, if you need to clean up.

So do your planning before departure day.

11. Plans, limits and AI credits

Only the organizer's plan matters. Everyone joining a trip is free, whatever plan the organizer is on.

Free — 1 trip, up to 6 participants including you, and all the core planning features. AI suggestions aren't included.
Pro — unlimited trips, unlimited participants, unlimited AI, priority support.

If you don't want a subscription, two one-off packs are available:

a trip pack, which adds an extra trip slot plus a bundle of AI calls,
an AI pack, which is just AI calls.

Credits from packs work even on the free plan, and are used only once your monthly allowance is gone. Your dashboard shows trips organized, the participant limit, and AI usage for the month. Current prices are on the pricing page, and you manage or cancel a subscription from the billing page.

12. Exports, offline use and installing the app

The meal plan, cooking rota and shopping list each export to CSV and PDF. Expenses export as a CSV, a settlement summary CSV, and a full PDF report. The PDFs are the ones to print and stick on the fridge; the CSVs are for anyone who wants to work in a spreadsheet.

Foodcrew is a progressive web app, so you can install it to your home screen from your browser's menu and open it like any other app. Pages you've already loaded stay readable without a signal — useful in a hut or a boat. You'll see a warning banner when you're offline; changes need a connection to save.

Still stuck?

Email contact@foodcrew.net and tell us what you were trying to do. For advice on feeding a group rather than on using the app, our guides cover quantities, batch cooking, cooking rotas and splitting costs.

User guide