Help center

CulinaMensa is a kitchen management platform that helps you organize recipes, track pantry inventory across multiple pantries, plan meals, monitor nutrition and health metrics, and share recipes, pantries and meal plans with the people you choose.

On the sign-in page, choose "Create account", enter your email address and a password, and accept the Terms of Service and Service Agreement. We'll send you a confirmation email — click the link (or enter the confirmation code) to confirm your address and unlock all features.

You must be at least 13 years old to create an account. If you are between 13 and 16, a parent or legal guardian must review and consent to your registration before you can use the service. See our Terms of Service for details.

The Free plan covers core recipe, pantry, planner, and community features. Premium unlocks additional capabilities such as Private recipes and meal plans, and any other features marked as Premium-only in the app. See the Service Agreement for current plan details and pricing.

Public recipes are visible to anyone, including people who aren't signed in. Restricted recipes are visible only to you and to people you've shared them with. Private recipes (Premium) are visible only to you. As the owner, you can change a recipe's visibility and manage who has access at any time from the recipe page.

Open the recipe you own, set its visibility to Restricted, then use "Manage access" to grant a specific person view access by email. They'll be able to view the recipe but not edit or delete it. You can revoke access at any time from the same panel.

If a recipe step specifies a particular ingredient variant (e.g. a specific brand or type), completing that step deducts only from that variant's stock. If that variant doesn't have enough quantity in your pantry, it's reported as missing rather than silently drawing from a different variant of the same ingredient.

Yes. Pantries set to Protected visibility can be shared with specific people by email, with either read-only or read-write access. Everyone with access sees the same live inventory and shopping list for that pantry.

The shopping list updates in real time for everyone with access to a shared pantry. If a collaborator adds an item, you'll see it appear automatically, labeled as added by another collaborator. Completing the shopping list adds the purchased items to the correct pantry for everyone who shares it.

An item that appears on your shopping list because your stock fell below a threshold you set can't be removed directly — it will disappear automatically once you restock above the threshold, delete the threshold, or remove the ingredient from the pantry. Items you added manually or by scanning a barcode can be removed at any time.

Yes, if you're signed in. When an ingredient search comes back empty, or a scanned barcode isn't recognized, choose "Describe this product". Enter the product name, then pick the ingredient it is a variant of or choose "New product". Everything else is optional (barcode, package unit and amount, density, piece weight, edible yield, nutrition, countries), but the more detail you add, the faster moderation can approve it. You can do this from the shopping list and when adding ingredients to a pantry.

It marks a product or ingredient that a user submitted and that moderators haven't approved yet. You can use it right away in your shopping list and pantry while it is reviewed. If the same barcode was already submitted, or was reviewed and rejected, you'll see a message instead of a duplicate. Once approved, the label disappears.

Yes, if the plan's visibility is set to Protected. As the owner, use the "Share plan" option to grant a specific person read-only access by email. Public plans are visible to anyone; Private plans (Premium) are visible only to you.

No. CulinaMensa's health and nutrition tools are for personal tracking and informational purposes only. They are not medical devices and do not provide medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always consult a qualified healthcare professional about your diet, health conditions, or before making changes based on data shown in the app.

Nutrition values and allergen tags are derived from ingredient database entries and the recipes you or other users create, and may be incomplete, outdated, or inaccurate. Do not rely on this information if you have a food allergy, intolerance, or medical dietary restriction — always verify ingredients and nutrition independently.

Follow another user from their profile. When they publish a new recipe, you'll receive a notification automatically. You can unfollow at any time, which stops future notifications from that user.

Yes, with Premium. CulinaMensa has an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server that lets an AI agent read and update your recipes, pantry, shopping list, meal plan and health data, limited to the access you grant it. MCP access is included in Premium and in the Family plan, where every family member gets the Premium features. Free and Ad-free accounts can't create access tokens.

1. Open your profile, then Account settings, then Access tokens. 2. Create a token: name it after the agent, pick an expiry and tick only the access scopes the agent needs. 3. Copy the token straight away — it is shown only once. 4. In your AI tool, add a remote MCP server at https://culinamensa.com/mcp and send the token as a Bearer credential, meaning an Authorization header with the value "Bearer" followed by your token. The steps for each service are below. Access tokens are the only way to sign in to the server; OAuth sign-in is not supported.

Use Claude Code. Run the command below in your terminal, replacing YOUR_TOKEN with your access token, then type /mcp inside Claude Code to check the connection. Custom connectors in the Claude apps (claude.ai and Claude Desktop) sign in with OAuth, which CulinaMensa doesn't support, so they can't be used with an access token.

claude mcp add --transport http culinamensa https://culinamensa.com/mcp --header "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_TOKEN"

In Codex CLI, keep your token in an environment variable and add the server with the first snippet; Codex sends it as a Bearer credential. With the OpenAI API, add the second snippet to the tools of your Responses API request, with your token as the authorization value. Custom connectors in the ChatGPT app sign in with OAuth, which CulinaMensa doesn't support, so ChatGPT itself can't be connected with an access token.

export CULINAMENSA_TOKEN="YOUR_TOKEN"
codex mcp add culinamensa --url https://culinamensa.com/mcp --bearer-token-env-var CULINAMENSA_TOKEN

{
  "type": "mcp",
  "server_label": "culinamensa",
  "server_url": "https://culinamensa.com/mcp",
  "authorization": "YOUR_TOKEN"
}

These steps are for Gemini CLI. Run the command below, replacing YOUR_TOKEN with your access token, then type /mcp inside Gemini CLI to check the connection. The --scope user flag keeps the token in your own settings file (~/.gemini/settings.json) instead of a project file you might commit.

gemini mcp add --scope user --transport http --header "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_TOKEN" culinamensa https://culinamensa.com/mcp

DeepSeek's models don't speak MCP themselves: an MCP client, or your own agent code, connects to the MCP server and passes its tools to the model. To use DeepSeek with CulinaMensa, pick a client that supports DeepSeek models and add the server there as a token-based remote MCP server — URL https://culinamensa.com/mcp, header "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_TOKEN". Check that client's documentation for how to select DeepSeek.

Revoke the token on the Access tokens page and create a new one whenever you reconnect an agent. Every request an agent makes is listed in the Activity log in your profile, which you can filter by token. Entries are kept for 180 days.

Open Billing from your profile to see your current subscription and billing history. From there you can also go to our payment processor's portal to manage your payment method and invoices.

You can cancel at any time on the Billing page in your profile. Your Premium access continues until the end of the billing period you've already paid for; we don't provide partial refunds for unused time except where required by law. See the Service Agreement for full billing terms.

Yes. Account Settings includes a data export tool that prepares a downloadable copy of your personal data within minutes, in line with your right to data portability under GDPR.

In Account Settings, choose "Delete account" and confirm by typing your email address or DELETE. Deletion is immediate and permanent — your account and personal data are erased right away and cannot be recovered, subject to the limited retention described in our Privacy Policy (e.g. records we must keep for legal or accounting purposes).

We apply access controls, encryption in transit, and permission checks on every shared resource so that only people you've authorized can see your content. No system is perfectly secure, however — see our Privacy Policy for details on how we protect your data and what to do if you have concerns.