One food catalog for the household, one diary per person

The line between shared and private

Most food tracking assumes one person with one goal. Put two people in a kitchen and the assumption breaks in two directions at once: the work of entering food is duplicated, and the results are merged when they should not be.

Pantensa draws the line in one place and keeps it there.

• Shared: products, recipes, the week plan.
• Private: your food diary, your targets, your closed days, your trend.

Everything on the first list is work that only needs doing once for the whole house. Everything on the second is personal information that nobody else in the household has a reason to see.

The catalog is the thing worth sharing

A household kitchen runs on maybe forty products and twenty recipes. Entering them twice — once per person — is the single largest waste of effort in family food tracking, and it also produces two catalogs that immediately begin to disagree: the same yogurt with two different serving sizes, the same soup with two different ingredient lists.

One catalog removes both problems. When someone scans a new product with the nutrition tracker with barcode scanner, it is in the household’s catalog, and it stays correct for everyone. When someone fixes a wrong number, it is fixed once.

Recipes behave the same way. A recipe is where the household’s real cooking knowledge lives — what actually goes into the soup, how many servings it actually makes — and that is knowledge the house holds jointly. See the recipe nutrition tracker for how a recipe turns into per-serving numbers.

One dinner, two targets

This is the case that a single-user tracker cannot express, and it is the ordinary case in a household.

Dinner is one thing that got cooked. It goes on the week plan once. Then:

• One person eats one serving and logs one serving.
• The other eats one and a half and logs one and a half.
• Each of those lands against a different calorie and protein target.
• Neither person’s day appears in the other’s.

The plan is a statement about the kitchen. The diary is a statement about a person. Keeping them as separate objects is what lets a household with different goals — someone cutting, someone bulking, someone simply eating — cook one meal instead of three.

Planning for the house, not for a profile

The meal planner with nutrition tracking is shared for the same reason the catalog is: a week of dinners is a household decision. Everyone can see it, everyone can add to it, and it is the same seven days for all of them.

What each person sees privately is how that shared week lands on them. The plan does not average people together, and it does not pick a compromise target. It shows the meals; your own targets do the rest of the work in your own diary.

Joining a household

A household is created by whoever starts, and other people join through an invite link. From the moment they join they have the shared catalog and the shared plan, and a diary that starts empty and stays theirs.

There is no admin console, no per-member permission matrix and no household leaderboard. The whole model is one shared catalog plus one private diary per person, and it is deliberately small enough to explain in a sentence.

Shopping and stock, for the household, later

Not in the first release

Pantry mode is not in the first release. When it arrives, the household is the natural unit for it: stock is a fact about a kitchen rather than about a person, and so is a shopping list.

That is why it is worth building the catalog now with the whole house in it. The products and recipes that carry your nutrition today are the same ones that will carry quantities, batches and a shopping list later — see the Pantry mode preview for what that layer is meant to do.