Allergies and dietary preferences
We offer a variety of options for food allergies, special diets, and food requests.
ARTICLE QUICK LINKS
Food allergies
Our number one concern is food safety.
- Your Elf can remove any ingredients.
- You can provide your own substitutes, but your Elf cannot buy substitute items for allergy reasons.
- You can request the use of your own cooking tools.
💡 If you have a gluten allergy, order gluten-free dinners rather than regular dinners with substitutions.
If you're concerned about cross-contact, we don't recommend using us.
- Elves use common kitchen tools and staples between homes.
- Some grocery items may have been processed in facilities where cross-contact with allergens could occur.
⚠️ If you have celiac disease, we don't recommend you use Dinner Elf.
Other dietary notes
On your appointment pages, add requests to omit or substitute ingredients.
For requests beyond omit or substitute requests, use the "other dietary notes" box.
- Good requests - chop veggies very small, remove garnishes, leave sauces on the side
- Bad requests - find walnuts processed in a peanut-free facility
Multi-diet households
If your household includes both meat eaters and vegetarians (or whatever), you can get creative in your menu choices and requests.
- Swap proteins - In appointment notes, request to swap a protein for tofu, fish, etc. Tip: Don't request a swap of fish for chicken drumsticks. 😀
- Deconstruct - In appointment notes, request to leave a protein on the side.
Seasoning
By default, Elves season your dinners to a medium level. Adjust these instructions on any appointment pages.
- High: Use 50% more salt and spices.
- Low: Use 50% less salt and spices.
Nutritional labels
We do not offer nutritional labels, calories, carbs, or macros for our dinners. Some customers enter the ingredient quantities (see below) from our recipes into sites like MyFitnessPal to create their own nutritional estimates.
Ingredients
From your appointment page or menu preview, click the i icon to view the full list of ingredients and quantities for a recipe.
Diets and filters
Use our filters to search by diets, cuisines, and more.
- Vegetarian: Our recipe planner is vegetarian, so we have lots of options :) For more vegetarian options, pick any dinner and add an appointment note for your Elf to swap a non-meat protein (e.g. tofu).
- Vegan: Select this option under our protein header.
- Gluten-free (G): Our gluten-free dinners may have cross-contamination.
- DASH diet: Dinners with the "DASH" prefix comply with the DASH diet.
- Paleo: Read about the paleo diet.
- Paleo+: Our paleo+ menu emphasizes whole foods and the elimination of sugar, alcohol, grains, legumes, soy, and dairy.
- Kid-friendly: The founders of Dinner Elf have two very picky eaters (one is a pancake-atarian), so we've been creative to create a menu that works
- Dairy-free: See our filter for dairy-free options.
- Low carb: We don't have a filter yet, but see the ingredients list for any dinner
- Low sodium: We don't have a filter yet, but see the ingredients list for any dinner
Over time, we'll add more filters for other diets. Let us know what you'd like to see.