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Share cookbooks and recipes with family

Joining a family doesn’t automatically share everything you’ve ever cooked. You decide what’s visible — at the cookbook level (share an entire collection) or recipe by recipe.

This page covers how to share content with your family, how to unshare, and what other members can do with shared content.

Share an entire cookbook

The most common pattern: pick a cookbook (say, “Weeknight Dinners”) and make it visible to everyone in the family. New recipes you add to that cookbook are automatically shared too.

  1. Open the Cookbook tab.
  2. Tap the cookbook you want to share.
  3. Tap the settings icon (gear) or Share button on the cookbook screen.
  4. Toggle Share with family on.
  5. If you’re in multiple families, pick which family to share it with.
  6. Tap Done.

The cookbook now appears under the Family section of every member’s Cookbook tab. New recipes you add to this cookbook are shared automatically too.

Share a single recipe

If you just want to share one recipe (not the whole cookbook it lives in):

  1. Open the recipe.
  2. Tap the Share button (usually a share icon or “Share” in the action menu).
  3. Choose Share to family.
  4. Pick which family if you’re in more than one.
  5. Tap Send.

The shared recipe appears in a special Shared with you view inside the receiving members’ Cookbook tab, and shows up in the family activity feed as “[Your name] shared [Recipe name]”.

The recipe stays in your personal cookbook too — you’re not moving it, you’re giving everyone a copy of the reference.

Unsharing

Unshare an entire cookbook:

  1. Open the cookbook.
  2. Tap the settings icon.
  3. Toggle Share with family off.
  4. Confirm.

The cookbook disappears from family members’ views immediately. They can’t see new updates to it.

Unshare a single recipe:

  1. Open the recipe in your cookbook.
  2. Tap Share → Sharing settings.
  3. Tap Stop sharing with [Family name].

What family members can do with shared content

Once a cookbook or recipe is shared, family members can:

  • View the recipe — title, ingredients, instructions, nutrition, photos
  • Add it to their meal plan — schedule it for a day/meal slot in their own meal plan
  • Add ingredients to their grocery list — copy ingredients to their own grocery list
  • Start Cook Mode on the recipe — see Cook Mode
  • Rate and review — ratings appear on the shared recipe, visible to the family

They cannot:

  • Edit the recipe (it stays read-only — you own it)
  • Delete the recipe
  • Re-share the recipe to other families they’re in (Forktastic prevents chain-sharing without your knowledge)

Who counts as “family”

Whoever is currently in the family group when you share gets access. If someone joins after you’ve shared a cookbook, they get access too — the share is to the family, not to specific people. If someone leaves (or is removed), they lose access immediately.

Sharing while joined to multiple families

If you’ve joined more than one family, you can share each cookbook to a different family — or to multiple families at once. The cookbook settings screen has a checkbox per family.

What doesn’t get shared

To protect privacy, Forktastic never shares:

  • Your meal plan — yours is yours
  • Your grocery list — even when ingredients come from shared recipes
  • Your import history or recipe edit history
  • Your account settings, language, theme
  • Your subscription details

Only the recipes / cookbooks you explicitly mark as shared.