The point: real needs, not preferences

When someone on your crew has a peanut allergy or follows a vegan diet, it is not a minor detail. At sea, far from a supermarket, a provisioning mistake can leave someone surviving on bananas for two days while the rest of the crew eats chili.

The good news: with a bit of method, a crew with varied profiles eats very well.

Collect the information before planning

The first step is to document each member's restrictions before touching the grocery list.

Questions to ask:

Are there any allergies (peanuts, tree nuts, shellfish, gluten, lactose)?
Are there ethical or religious restrictions (vegetarian, vegan, halal, kosher)?
Are there strong aversions that would make a particular meal difficult to eat?

Write it all down. It prevents surprises aboard.

Strategies for inclusive meals

Plan one or two fully inclusive meals per day. Not every meal needs to work for everyone — but at least one meal a day should suit the whole crew without adaptation.

Separate the components. A vegetable curry served with chicken on the side, for example, lets each crew member help themselves according to their needs. This "common base + choice of protein" approach is practical and space-efficient.

Have simple substitutes ready. If a meal includes cheese, having an alternative (hummus, roasted cashews) for members who do not eat dairy costs very little.

Documentation is key

Whether you use a notebook, a shared spreadsheet, or a tool like crewmenu, the essential thing is that each member's restrictions are visible when the menus are built — not just in the cook's head.

crewmenu lets each member enter their dietary preferences directly in their profile, and menus in the public Resources section can be filtered by diet to give you ideas suited to your crew.

What to remember

Collect the information before the grocery run, not during.
Lean on modular dishes rather than monolithic recipes.
Document. Information stuck in one person's head is useless when that person is on night watch.