Four short guides — pick one to start, or browse in order. Nothing here assumes you've read anything else first.
Shopping Lists
Quick to add to, and private to your own iCloud account unless you choose to share one.
Adding an item
Auto Add and Manual Add sit at the top of every list, always visible — no menu to dig through.
Manual Add — type the name, then optionally a quantity, unit and notes.
Auto Add — scan a barcode (Sustain looks up the product name automatically) or scan printed text, like packaging or a handwritten list, and tap the line you want to use.
Either way, nothing is added until you confirm the quantity and unit yourself. Add something that's already on the list and Sustain merges it instead of creating a duplicate — even when the wording's a little different ("garlic clove" and "garlic, crushed" merge into one).
Working through a list
Swipe an item left to reveal Ordered (marks it done and removes it), then Move and Remove further along. Swipe all the way across in one go and Ordered fires immediately — handy for working through a list quickly while you're actually shopping.
Ordered lives on the left-hand swipe on purpose — a right-hand swipe would fight with iPhone's own "swipe from the edge to go back" gesture.
Sharing your progress
Share as Text sends a one-off plain-text snapshot through the share sheet — handy for a quick message, but not kept in sync. For genuine two-way sharing, see Sharing Your Kitchen.
Siri & Shortcuts
"Hey Siri, add an item to Weekly Shop in Sustain" adds a plain item by name — set its quantity and notes afterwards in the app. The same action works in the Shortcuts app for your own automations.
Meal Planner
Plan a week of meals alongside your recipes and shopping lists — synced across your devices automatically.
Planning a week
Each day has four slots: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner and Dessert. For any slot you can add a recipe (search your recipe box, up to 12 per slot), mark it Eating Out, add a free-text note instead of or alongside a recipe, or set servings just for that meal.
Servings that scale themselves
Every meal has a servings count, either its own or the app-wide default. If a recipe states a different number of servings than the slot it's going into, Sustain offers to scale the ingredients to match — accept it, keep it as written, or say don't ask again for that combination. Scaling only ever affects that one meal; the recipe itself is untouched.
Reminders
Tap the calendar icon on a slot to add a Calendar reminder — a title, date, time, how far ahead the alert fires, which calendar, and an optional note. A slot can have more than one, each its own chip. These are normal Calendar events, so if you share your kitchen with someone, they can see that a reminder exists (title, time, notes) but can only act on it if it's on a calendar they also have access to.
If you share your kitchen, a shared or Family calendar means everyone can actually open and act on a reminder — a personal calendar works fine too, it just means only you can.
Turning a week into a shopping list
⋯ → Add to List compiles every ingredient across the week's recipes into one place — quantities already combined across recipes and meals. For each ingredient, tap a list's name to send it there, Have It to skip it this time, or Never Buy to add it to Staples so it's never suggested again. Made a mistake? Undo sits at the top and walks back through your last few taps.
Copying and clearing
⋯ → Copy to Another Day… repeats a meal — recipes, notes, servings and scaling all come across. Clear Week and Clear Day ask for confirmation first, and both offer Undo afterwards. Once a week is over, it becomes read-only — you can still copy from it, just not edit it directly.
Recipes
A personal recipe box that lives in your own iCloud account, right alongside your lists.
Four ways to add a recipe
Type it in — title, ingredients (one per line), and method.
Paste a link — Sustain fetches the page and fills in the title, ingredients, method and servings for you.
Share it from Safari — use the Share button on any recipe page, then Add to Sustain; open the app afterwards and it's waiting, ready to review.
Scan a cookbook page — line the page up like scanning a document, and Sustain reads the text off it the same way.
Whichever method, nothing is saved until you check it over and tap Save.
Keeping the screen on while you cook
Tap the sun icon next to Edit on a recipe's screen to stop the device auto-locking while you're looking at it — ideal for messy hands mid-recipe. It turns back off by itself the moment you leave.
Ratings, tags & finding things again
Rate any recipe 1–5 stars, and filter your whole collection down to just the highly-rated ones. Tags cover dish type, cuisine, meal and diet — tap Suggest Tags and Sustain proposes some based on the title, ingredients and source, which you can accept, edit or ignore. The search bar matches titles, tags and ingredients at once, and tapping more than one tag narrows the results further rather than widening them.
Backing up your collection
Recipes → ⋯ → Export Recipes… saves every recipe to a single file you can store wherever you like, and bring straight back in later with Import from File if you ever need to.
Sharing Your Kitchen
One invite, everything shared — no separate share button for each list, recipe or plan.
What "Share Everything" actually shares
Settings → Share Everything… shares your shopping lists, your whole recipe box, your meal planner, and your item categories/shopping staples together with up to 12 people in one invite. Anyone who accepts can see and edit all of it — everything stays in sync on every side, the same way it works across your own devices.
The one exception
Add to List — turning a meal plan into a shopping list — stays owner-only. Everyone else can still view and edit the plan itself, just not push it onto a shopping list. It's the one place a shared kitchen isn't fully equal, to avoid the same ingredients getting compiled onto a list twice by two different people.
Managing who's in
Settings → Shared With… shows everyone who's accepted, and lets the owner remove someone at any point. Sharing uses Apple's own sharing sheet, the same one Notes or Reminders uses — by Messages, Mail, or a link.
