Gather around food everyone can actually eat.
Plan potlucks, dinners, and cookouts where no one's reading labels in the corner. Spread coordinates the menu, tracks every ingredient, and keeps everyone's allergies visible before the invites go out.
Two problems, one app.
Hosting is a spreadsheet in disguise.
Group texts. "I'll bring something!" with no specifics. Three people show up with the same salad and no one brought bread. Hosting a gathering shouldn't require a project manager.
Allergens are a guessing game.
"Is there dairy in this?" "I think so?" Anyone with a serious allergy or restriction has spent dinners eating before they arrive, or politely picking around things. The people cooking for them want to do better. They just need the information.
Spread fixes both at the same time, because they're the same problem: gatherings work better when everyone knows what's on the table.
From invite to last bite, in three steps.
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Create the event.
Date, place, vibe. Invite by link or email.
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Build the menu together.
Guests claim or bring dishes. Recipes carry their full ingredient list with them, so nothing gets lost between planning and cooking.
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See who's bringing what.
Spread lays out the dishes and the guest list side by side, with everyone's allergies visible right where hosts need them, before anyone shows up hungry.
Features
Allergen profiles that travel with you.
Set them once. Your profile comes with you to every event you're invited to. You decide what's shared with hosts, what's shared with other guests, and what stays just for you.
Recipes that carry their ingredients with them.
Add a recipe once, and its full ingredient list travels with it everywhere it's used, at every event. No more group texts asking what's actually in the dish, or guessing what "special sauce" means.
New guest? Their allergies show up instantly.
When someone new RSVPs, their allergies and severity land on the host's screen right away. No more remembering who can't eat what halfway through cooking.
A private place to track your reactions.
Log a reaction in a few taps: what you ate, how you felt, how bad it got. It's especially useful for the long tail of triggers that don't show up on a standard panel, the kind you only spot by keeping a record.
Your reaction journal is private and never shared with hosts or other users.
Built for everyone at the table.
Colorblind-friendly palette. Severity always shows up in color, icon, and text together, never just one, so nothing gets missed at a glance.
Built by someone who needs it
I'm Ashley. I have eosinophilic esophagitis (EoE) and a long list of food allergies and intolerances. Some are anaphylactic. Some are "I'll feel terrible for two days." Some I just avoid because the trade isn't worth it. The list is long enough that even I forget pieces of it sometimes.
But the real reason spread exists isn't my own list. It's that I want to take care of the people I love at the table, and I want them to be able to take care of me without it being a burden. The people doing the cooking want to get it right. The guests with their own restrictions deserve the same thoughtfulness I'd want for myself. Right now, both sides do a lot of work to make that happen, and a lot still falls through the cracks.
Part of what falls through is severity. People often assume every allergy is an EpiPen-level emergency, and the conversation gets stuck there. The difference between "this will send me to the hospital," "this will ruin my week," and "I just don't eat it" matters a lot for cooking, and right now there's no good way to communicate that without a long explanation every time.
My family has its own mix of allergies and intolerances, so I see this from every angle. Planning holidays takes real work, and the work is mostly invisible because the people doing it are doing it out of love. Spread is the app I wanted to exist for everyone in that picture: the hosts trying to get it right, the guests who'd rather just enjoy the meal, and the families who've been quietly managing this for years.
About the project
Spread was a passion project, built by one person over about a year. It works, and it is finished enough to describe honestly. It is not going to be released.
- What it was.
A mobile and web app for planning food-centered gatherings — potlucks, dinner parties, holidays, cookouts — where every guest could eat safely. It coordinated the menu, tracked ingredients across dishes and guests, and surfaced allergen conflicts before the invites went out.
- How it was built.
React Native and Expo from a single codebase for iOS, Android, and web, on a Postgres backend with row-level security. Recipes were parsed from URLs and photos, then matched against a normalized ingredient and allergen graph so a dish could be checked against a guest list automatically.
- Why it stopped.
The hard part was never the software. It was that being wrong had real consequences. An ingredient database with gaps, a mislabeled product, a recipe edited after someone read it — any of those can turn a tool people trust into a tool that hurts them. Building something people rely on for safety asks for accountability, review, and insurance that a solo project cannot honestly provide.
- What I took from it.
Most of the engineering held up. The judgment call was the harder problem, and the right answer turned out to be not shipping. I would rather have built the thing and stopped than shipped it and hoped.
Get in touch
I'm happy to talk about how spread was built, what the allergen data model looked like, or why I decided not to ship it.
If you had an account and want your data removed, email me and I'll take care of it.
ashley@spreadapp.coThere's no mailing list and no form behind this — it goes straight to me.