Avoid ingredients and set dietary preferences in NoshUp

Avocado keeps turning up in your meal plan, but nobody in your household wants it. Or someone has an allergy, and you want to stop getting recipes that list that ingredient.

You do not need to remove it from every suggested dinner. Tell NoshUp what your household eats, and what you want left out, before generating your next plan.

Two ways to shape your meals

Dietary restrictions cover a short list of common diets and needs, such as vegetarian or gluten-free. Excluded ingredients lets you name any particular ingredient you want out of your generated plans, whether that is because of an allergy or simply because you dislike it.

Use either setting, or both together. A vegetarian household can still exclude avocado. A household with no dietary restrictions can keep mushrooms out of its suggestions without choosing a diet.

These are household preferences, so they apply to the shared plan rather than just one person's plate.

Dietary restrictions

1. Open Settings and find Household.
2. Under Dietary restrictions, tick Vegetarian, Vegan, Gluten-free, or Nut allergy, as appropriate.
3. Choose Save changes.

Every generated meal plan uses those saved choices, and its recipes reflect them. Some ingredients get a suitable substitute, such as a vegetarian alternative in place of meat. Other ingredients or unsuitable recipes are avoided rather than forced into a swap.

This is a fixed set of options, not a list of every possible allergy or ingredient. If you are looking for an avocado checkbox, use the field just below instead.

Excluding specific ingredients

Excluded ingredients is right below Dietary restrictions in Household settings. You can now type an ingredient yourself instead of needing to find it in a preset list.

To keep avocado out:

1. Open Settings and find Excluded ingredients.
2. Start typing avocado. The box suggests known ingredients as you type.
3. Select the matching suggestion, or choose Add to use what you typed. An ingredient does not have to appear in the suggestions to be added.
4. Check that avocado appears in your excluded list, then choose Save changes.

Add any other ingredients the same way. This is for specific things you want left out entirely, not just used less often. An allergy, a strong dislike, or an ingredient your family never enjoys are all reasons to use it.

Once saved, the list carries forward to every future generated plan. You do not need to remove avocado meal by meal or enter it again each week. To welcome it back later, use the remove button beside it and choose Save changes.

How this affects your meal plan and grocery list

When you generate or regenerate a plan on Meals, NoshUp will not suggest a recipe that lists an excluded ingredient. Excluding avocado means choosing other recipes, not asking you to pick it out afterwards.

This also applies to recipes your household has saved and recipe favourites you have pinned to repeat. If your usual pinned Friday dinner contains avocado, NoshUp skips that pinned choice for the week when generating the plan. The pin does not silently override your exclusion.

The grocery list generated from the plan also leaves out excluded ingredients supplied by recipes. Avocado should not return through a recipe's shopping ingredients after you have excluded it.

Saving a preference is not the same as replacing an existing week. Regenerate the dates you want to update, review the new meals, and check any grocery list you already made. An existing list is not automatically rewritten just because you changed Settings.

What's not filtered

You are still in control of what you add by hand. If you deliberately pick a specific meal or swap one in yourself, that choice is not automatically checked against these settings.

The same goes for ingredients you type yourself for a custom or homemade meal. Those remain your choices, including ingredients you want on the grocery list. Review them as you add them.

Think of these preferences as help with meal planning, not a replacement for checking recipes and food labels when managing an allergy.

Other ways to customize your plan

In Settings, Cultural module chooses your cuisine focus: Indian, Italian, Mexican, or an Everyday Variety mix, for example. Switching cuisines is a Pro feature and applies to your next generated plan.

On Meals, open the Tools row for choices about this week:

• Meal types lets you skip breakfast, choose Dinners only, or select your own mix.
• Leftovers helps you plan dinner leftovers for lunch.
• Constraints lets you choose a weekly theme or a Calories per serving target, where verified calorie information is available.

Start with the ingredients you want left out. Then shape the week around the meals you actually need.