Spread is an app for planning food-centered gatherings (potlucks, dinner parties, holidays, cookouts) where everyone can eat safely. It coordinates the menu, tracks ingredients across dishes and guests, and flags allergen or dietary conflicts before the event happens.

Spread is built by Ashley, a solo developer in Fort Collins, Colorado. The motivation is personal: she lives with EoE and multiple food allergies, some severe, some milder, several outside the FDA's top nine, and she loves hosting and going to gatherings with friends. Sharing food with people you love should not feel like an anxiety management exercise. Spread is the app she wanted to exist: one that takes the cognitive weight of allergen coordination off both the host and the guest, so the meal can just be a meal.

No. Spread is coordination software, not medical advice. It makes allergen information visible and easy to share, but the responsibility for safety always stays with the people involved. For serious allergies, always confirm directly with the person who cooked a dish. Spread is built to make that conversation easier, not unnecessary.

The nine common allergens recognized by the FDA (peanuts, tree nuts, eggs, milk, soy, wheat, shellfish, fish, and sesame) plus the major dietary patterns: vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free, dairy-free, and keto. You can also track anything else. Flag any ingredient in our database as something you avoid (nightshades, specific spices, individual proteins, religious restrictions, personal triggers) and Spread will treat it the same way as the big nine across every recipe and event.

When a recipe gets added, Spread tags allergens automatically: first with string-based matching against the canonical ingredient list, then with an LLM pass for the trickier cases (hidden ingredients, ambiguous names, regional terms for the same thing). The community then makes it better over time. Any user can flag a missed allergen or a wrong annotation, and those corrections improve the tagging for everyone.

This is exactly what the LLM tagging step is for. Worcestershire to anchovies, "natural flavors" to possible dairy, fish sauce to shellfish-adjacent risks. It's not perfect, which is why the flag-a-correction loop exists. The system gets sharper with use.

Use Spread as one layer of safety, not the only one. The automatic tagging plus community corrections give you a much better starting point than a group text, but no app can know what came into contact with what in someone else's kitchen, or whether a label changed since the recipe was written. For anaphylactic-level allergies, confirm directly with whoever cooked. Spread makes that conversation faster and more informed; it doesn't replace it.

A private log, just for you. Record what you ate and how you reacted, and Spread keeps it personal and never shares it with hosts, guests, or other users. If an ingredient shows up in foods you've reacted to multiple times, Spread will quietly let you know, so you can spot patterns you might not have caught yourself. It's especially useful for the long tail of triggers that don't show up on standard allergy panels.

Yes. Your account is how Spread knows what to check dishes against. Creating one takes about a minute, and your profile works across every event you're invited to.

You decide. For each piece of your profile, you can choose to share with hosts only, with hosts and other guests, or keep it private and rely on Spread's behind-the-scenes safety checks. The default settings are conservative; you opt in to wider sharing if you want it.

Spread is built around home-cooked gatherings (potlucks, dinner parties, holiday meals) where ingredient transparency is the whole point. It's the strongest fit when guests are bringing or making dishes themselves.

Yes. Changes update everywhere the recipe is used, and Spread re-checks safety against the current guest list automatically.

Both. Spread is built with Expo, so it runs as a native mobile app and on the web from the same codebase.

Rolling invites starting soon. Invites go out in small batches so early users get real attention and the safety features get stress-tested properly. Earlier signups get earlier access.

Yes during the beta, and the core safety features will always be free. Spread is built and run by one person right now, and keeping it running long-term (servers, the AI tagging that powers allergen detection, security, ongoing development) costs real money. At some point there will likely be a paid tier for things like larger events, advanced features, or community spaces, so that the safety-critical parts can stay free for everyone who needs them. We'll be transparent about what's changing well before anything changes.

Telling us about your use case in the signup form helps. Hosts of regular potlucks and anyone coordinating around serious allergies tend to move up the list, because their gatherings are the best stress tests for the features under active development.

Once you're in, yes. Every beta user gets a handful of invite links. Hosting works better when your guests are on the app too, so bringing your circle along is encouraged.

Your profile, events, and reaction journal exist so the app can function. They aren't sold or shared, and there are no ads. Your reaction journal in particular stays private to you and is never visible to other users in any form.

Recipes you've added stay in the community library, but your name comes off them. This is intentional: other users may already be relying on those allergen tags for their own events, and pulling the data would leave them without safety information they were counting on. If you'd rather not contribute recipes to the shared library at all, that's something we're thinking about for a future setting. Let us know if it matters to you.

Right now, yes. When you add a recipe, it goes into the shared library where other users can find and use it. Allergen tags and community corrections travel with the recipe. Private recipes are on the roadmap.

Yes, at any time. Your profile, reaction journal, and event history are removed. Recipes you authored stay in the community library with your name removed, for the reason described above.

On Supabase, hosted in the US. Standard encryption in transit and at rest.