Meals & Dietary Requirements

Meals & Dietary Requirements

Record what each person on a production eats — once — and have it reach the places that actually order the food: the catering calculator and the call sheet.

Added in v0.534.0.

Where it lives

What a profile holds

• Diet — Vegetarian, Vegan, Pescatarian, Halal, Kosher, No pork, No beef, Lactose-free, Gluten-free. Pick from the chips or type your own.
• Allergies & intolerances — Tree nuts, Peanuts, Gluten, Lactose, Shellfish, Fish, Egg, Soy, Sesame, Celery, Mustard, plus anything you type.
• Notes for catering — free text for what isn't a tag: "eats before call", "no cold food on set".

Typing Vegetarian by hand and clicking the Vegetarian chip produce the same stored entry, so the counts never split across two spellings.

Inheritance and per-project overrides

A profile belongs to the person, so it lives on the contact:

1. Set it on the contact once.
2. Every project that books that contact shows the same profile, marked From contact: <name>.
3. If someone eats differently on one job, edit it on that project's crew row. That creates a per-project override — the contact is untouched.
4. Use contact's clears the override and restores inheritance.

Crew members with no linked contact simply own their profile directly.

Cast works differently on purpose. Characters aren't linked to contacts, so a character's profile lives on the character record and there is nothing to inherit.

Catering calculator

Budget tab → catering calculator. Below the usual people × days × rate inputs you get a breakdown:

• Diets as counts (Vegetarian ×6).
• Allergies as counts with the names attached.

It covers project crew + temporary crew — exactly the population the calculator's own head count uses. Cast is not included, because a breakdown that counted more people than the head count shown beside it would be misleading. Cast dietary data appears on the call sheet instead, which is per-day and does include cast.

Note that the counts do not add up to the head count: one person can hold several diets. The calculator says so explicitly.

Call sheet

There are two dietary surfaces here and they are deliberately different. One is for you while you build the sheet; the other is the document you hand out.

The builder banner — internal, always on

While you are building a call sheet, a banner shows the dietary and allergy constraints for the people called that day — crew rostered plus cast required. It has no toggle and is not affected by the section toggle below, because it never leaves your screen: it is the planning view, not the document.

• Allergies lead, with names — the thing you actually need to notice.
• Diets follow as counts without names, the same asymmetry the PDF uses.
• If nobody called that day has anything on file, no banner appears at all, so a production that never uses the feature never sees it.

Underneath the banner, the crew grid and the cast list each carry the chips on the person's own row — a green diet chip, an amber allergy chip with a warning icon. That is where you notice a constraint at the moment you are assigning someone a call time, rather than having to hold the banner's summary in your head. Crew and cast get identical treatment; a crew member's chips come from their contact profile unless the project's Crew tab overrides it, and temporary crew are included on the same terms.

You do not need to switch the PDF block on in order to see who has an allergy. That is worth saying plainly: the outward block below is a disclosure decision, not the way you look something up.

The PDF block — outward-facing, opt-in

The block is off by default. Turn on the Dietary Needs section toggle in the call-sheet builder to include it.

When on, the PDF prints under CATERING / LUNCH:

• Diets as counts only, without names — Vegetarian: 6 · Vegan: 2. A caterer needs the number, not a list of who is vegan.
• Allergies with names — Tree nuts (1) — Ana Meyer. The kitchen has to know which plate goes to whom.
• Notes, attributed to the person who set them.

A character is listed under the performer's name where one is cast, falling back to the character name when the part is not yet filled — the same rule in both the banner and the PDF, so the two never disagree about who a row belongs to.

If nobody on that day has anything on file, the block prints nothing at all rather than an empty heading.

The block covers everyone on the sheet plus the cast required that day — project crew, temporary crew, and cast in one set of counts, which is what a caterer orders against.

It reads live crew and cast rather than the call sheet's saved snapshot, so it reflects the profiles as they stand the moment you export. (That is also why adding it changed no existing sheet: a field the drift detector compares would have made every already-saved call sheet report "Project data has changed".)

Why the toggle is off by default

Allergy information is health data under GDPR Art. 9 — a special category with a higher bar than ordinary contact details. A call sheet is circulated to the whole unit and sometimes beyond it. Publishing this is therefore a deliberate per-sheet decision, never a default, and diets are aggregated to counts so the sheet discloses no more than catering actually needs.

Related

• CONTACTS.md — the contact record
• CALL_SHEETS.md — section toggles and PDF export
• BILLING.md — the budget tab and catering calculator

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Last Updated: 2026-09-10 Version: 0.790.2