How the Amamable meal plan works: where dishes come from, allergens and the shopping list

You pick the days, and Amamable builds a meal plan for the whole family. Here is what happens under the hood: where the plan gets its dishes, why you get the same result twice, how your household's allergens are handled, and what happens with a recipe that has a recipe of its own inside. The whole cycle from recipe to shopping is covered in the guide How Amamable works.

Where the plan gets its dishes

The plan reaches for dishes in a fixed order, from three sources:

1. Liked dishes — dishes that someone in your household marked with a heart. One person's like counts for the whole family.
2. The rest of your family's recipes — recipes your family has added to the app that nobody has liked yet.
3. Ready-made dishes from Amamable chefs — a catalogue of tried-and-tested recipes that fills the plan when you don't have enough dishes of your own.

As long as there is something to choose from, a dish does not repeat in the plan. If there are more days than dishes in the pool, repeats only start once the plan has used up all three sources. The diet from your profile works as a preference for order: within one source, dishes that match the diet come first, but they never jump ahead of a higher source and they never remove anything from the plan.

The same day, the same plan

The plan is not made by a language model or by a dice roll. It is a predictable algorithm, so the same family and the same day give the same plan, and generating it again does not change the days that are already planned. The shopping list is calculated the same way, straight from the plan. AI does show up elsewhere in Amamable, for example when you import a recipe from a link or a photo, but it does not decide what is in the plan.

Your household's allergens

The app filters the allergens of your household. In a family, the sum counts: if anyone in the household has excluded an allergen, dishes containing it do not make it into the plan — from any of the three sources. The filter relies on the allergens marked on recipes and does not replace reading the label on a package.

A base recipe in the same meal

Some dishes have a base recipe inside — a tortilla or a stock, say, that you make separately. In the plan, such a recipe gets an entry of its own on the same day and in the same meal as the dish, so it is obvious it needs making. If two dishes in one meal use the same base, they share one base entry and its amounts add up.

One shopping list from the plan

The ingredients from the days you pick merge into one list: the same product is one item, and the amounts add up on their own. A base recipe does not double anything — its ingredients go on the list once.

What next

We are also looking at diets built from ingredients and at substitutes, but for now that is a direction, not an announcement of a specific feature.

Questions and answers

Does artificial intelligence build the meal plan?

No. The plan and the shopping list are calculated by a deterministic algorithm, with no language model involved. AI is used in Amamable for other things, such as importing a recipe from a link or a photo, and it never decides what the plan contains.

Will I get the same plan if I ask for it a second time?

Yes. The same family and the same day give the same plan, and days that are already planned stay as they were.

How does the plan take allergies in the family into account?

The app filters the allergens of all household members at once: one person's exclusion applies when the plan is built for the whole family. Dishes with that allergen do not make it into the plan, including those from the catalogue of ready-made dishes. The filter relies on the allergens marked on recipes and does not replace reading the label on a package.

What happens if I don't have enough recipes for all the days?

The plan first picks liked dishes, then the rest of your family's recipes, then ready-made dishes from Amamable chefs. Only when it has used all three sources does it start repeating dishes.