Planning around intolerances without making it the whole meal
A gluten-free plan should still feel like dinner, not a workaround. Here is how Forkless thinks about constraints under the hood.
When someone in your household can’t do gluten, the rest of the planning problem doesn’t get smaller. It gets harder. Every recipe in the candidate set has to clear a hard filter, then an actually-good filter, then the boring filter — does it use the same chicken breasts as Thursday’s plan, or are we now buying two pounds of meat to use half of each.
A naive approach treats the intolerance as a tag and walks away. Tag the recipe, tag the user, exclude on mismatch. Done.
Why that breaks
It breaks the moment a recipe has a soy-sauce line that could be tamari, or a flour-thickened gravy that could be cornstarch, or a pasta dish that could be a rice-bowl rebuild. A tag-based filter throws all three away. A reasonable cook sees three trivially adaptable dinners.
What Forkless does
The plan generator runs a two-phase pass. The first phase is the hard filter — anything that genuinely can’t be made safely is gone. The second phase scores adaptable recipes lower than native-fit recipes, but keeps them in the candidate set with a noted swap. When the plan ships, the recipe card surfaces the swap inline: “Use tamari, not soy sauce. The rest of the recipe is unchanged.”
The result is a week of dinners that read as dinners, not as a workaround for the constraint. The constraint shows up where it matters — in the ingredient list — and disappears everywhere else.
What we’re still figuring out
Cross-contamination at the ingredient level is a separate problem. A gluten-free flour blend is safe; a flour blend processed in a shared facility is sometimes not. We surface the recipe-level signal today; the ingredient-level signal is tracked for a later pass.
— The Forkless team