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About this tool
Assign potluck dishes across guests, balancing courses and dietary constraints.
The Potluck Dish Assigner takes your guest list with each person's dietary tags, the courses you need covered, and who has offered what, then returns a table showing every dish against the dietary needs it is not labelled for, plus a verdict naming any course still missing. It is for whoever ended up organising the shared meal and is trying to work out whether four people all bringing dessert leaves anyone with nothing they can eat. The check is tag-based: a dish only counts as covering 'vegan' or 'nut-free' if you have labelled it that way.
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In 'People and dietary needs' put one guest per line as Person | dietary tags, such as Chirag | vegan; write none where there is no restriction.
List the courses in 'Needed courses' — starter, main, side, dessert — and add each offer under Dish offers as Person | dish | course | dietary tags.
The table returns Person, Dish, Course, Tags and Dietary review, and the verdict reads 'All entered courses covered' or names the missing courses.
The verdict either reads 'All entered courses covered' or lists the specific courses with no offer against them, so you know who to chase and for what.
Every tag on the guest list is checked against each dish's own tags, and the review column lists the ones that dish does not claim to cover rather than giving a single pass/fail.
A dish submitted with no dietary tags shows as 'Unlabelled', so a missing label never quietly reads as a dish that is fine for everyone.
One line per entry, pipe-separated. Guests are 'Person | dietary tags' — for example 'Chirag | vegan' — and offers are 'Person | dish | course | dietary tags', such as 'Asha | lentil salad | starter | vegan,nut-free'. Use 'none' for a guest with no restriction; it is ignored in the matching.
It compares the set of dietary tags collected from all guests against the tags on each dish, and reports any guest-list tag the dish is not labelled with. It reads labels only — it does not know ingredients, so an unlabelled nut-free dish will show 'nut-free' as unreviewed.
It works from the offers you enter rather than allocating dishes for you, then shows which of your listed courses still have no offer. That keeps who-brings-what a human decision while making the gap obvious.
No — treat it strictly as a planning aid. It cannot verify ingredients, cross-contact in a shared kitchen, preparation, storage, transport or labelling, and anyone with a serious allergy or a medical dietary requirement should confirm details directly with the person cooking and follow their own medical advice.