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 keeps everyone's allergies and dietary needs visible 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, sharing it with hosts just like any other allergy.

Use Spread as one layer of coordination, not the only one. Guests can share exactly what they're allergic to, and how severe it is, directly with the host, which gives everyone 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. It's especially useful for the long tail of triggers that don't show up on standard allergy panels, since you're the one keeping track.

Yes. Your account is how Spread knows what to share with your hosts. 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 entirely private. 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, so everyone sees the current version.

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

No. Spread is not being released. Development has stopped, the beta is closed, the web app has been taken down, and there is no App Store or Google Play release. This site remains as a record of what was built.

Because it was a safety-critical app run by one person. When an app tells someone a dish is safe to eat, being wrong has consequences — a gap in the ingredient database, a mislabeled product, a recipe edited after someone read it. Standing behind that responsibly takes review, accountability, and insurance that a solo project cannot honestly provide. That is a judgment about responsibility, not about whether the software worked.

There are no plans to release it. If that ever changes, it would be announced here first.

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 that recipe for their own events, and pulling it out from under them isn't fair to their planning. 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. 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.