Food is at the heart of every celebration — holiday meals, potlucks, dinner parties. But collaborative cooking can be complicated: menu planning, groceries, who’s bringing what.
This update introduces Communities — a way to share recipes and plan meals with the people you cook with.
Three types of communities
Household
Your home kitchen. Everyone in the household shares a recipe collection and can edit recipes together. Maximum 6 members, and you can only belong to one — part of how we respect your privacy and the copyright protections of recipe creators.
Group
Friends who cook. A group for your dinner club, your neighbors who swap recipes, or your extended family scattered across the country. Share recipes when you want to. Maximum 20 members, and you can join as many groups as you like.
Event
A one-time gathering. Thanksgiving dinner, a potluck, a birthday party. Create an event, invite people, assign dishes, and build a shared shopping list. After the event date passes, the community auto-archives — the recipes and history stay, but it moves out of your active view.
There’s crossover, too: your group can host an event, and you can turn a successful one-off event into a group to keep the collaboration going.
Meal planning inside communities
Each community has a built-in meal planner. Create a meal, add recipes from your collection, and assign cooks. For events, this is how you coordinate who’s bringing what. For households, it’s how you plan the week.
You can also generate per-person shopping lists from a meal — so everyone knows exactly what they need to buy.
Invitations
Invite people by email. If they already have a Sharp Cooking account, they join immediately. If they don’t, they’ll receive an email with a link to create a free account and automatically join the community.
Private by default
Communities don’t change how your recipes are stored. Your recipes stay in your collection — sharing to a community creates a link, not a copy. If you leave a community, your recipes come with you.
Nothing is public. There are no feeds, no discovery, no algorithms. Communities are private spaces for people you choose.
Additional privacy improvements
This release also includes improvements to how we handle your data:
- Stronger data minimization across our analytics and tracking systems
- Automatic cleanup of expired authentication tokens
- Metadata stripping from uploaded images
We’ll have more to say about privacy in a future update. It’s something we think about a lot.
Try it
Open the app, go to Communities, and create your first one. Start with a household if you cook with a partner or family — it’s the fastest way to see how shared recipes work.