Assistants

Plan family dinners in Claude with Ulivo

Already chatting with Claude? Add Ulivo as a custom connector and Claude can plan your family's dinners too. You talk to Claude as usual; behind it, Ulivo holds who's in your family and what each person can and can't eat, picks a dinner for every night, double-checks it, and turns the week into one shopping list.

Ulivo is an independent app and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Anthropic. Claude is a trademark of Anthropic.

Before you start

The connector signs in to a Ulivo account, so that comes first. Sign-ups are currently through the waitlist. Put your email on the waitlist and you'll hear from us once, when Ulivo opens. After that, adding it to Claude is a two-minute job.

Connect Ulivo to Claude

Claude adds custom connectors from its settings. Anthropic decides which Claude plans include custom connectors, and on Team and Enterprise plans an owner may need to add the connector for the organization first. The menu names below may change slightly over time:

1. Open connector settings. In Claude, open Settings and go to Connectors.

2. Add a custom connector. Choose to add a custom connector, name it "Ulivo", and paste this URL:

   https://getulivo.com/mcp

3. Sign in to Ulivo. Choose Connect. Claude opens a getulivo.com page: sign in with your Ulivo account and approve the connection. You can choose read-only access if you'd like Claude to see your plan without changing anything.

4. Use it in a chat. In a new chat, make sure Ulivo is turned on in the chat's tools menu, then ask for your week.

Claude may ask your permission the first time it uses each Ulivo action. You can allow them one at a time or for the whole chat. Shorter steps for every assistant are on how to connect.

What to ask

No special commands. Some things to try:

Plan our dinners for next week. Thursday is my late night at work.

Something quick on Tuesday, under 20 minutes.

No pasta this week.

Swap Saturday for the lemon chicken and potatoes.

We already have olive oil, lemons and rice.

Make the shopping list.

Everyone loved the lentil soup. Alex thought the shakshuka was too spicy.

Why connect Ulivo instead of just asking Claude

You could ask Claude for a dinner plan without Ulivo, and you'd get a reasonable list. The difference shows up in week two. Here's a Tuesday in a family where Maya is allergic to tree nuts and never eats onions, and Alex has soccer:

• Claude remembers Maya's allergy because Ulivo stored it. You told Ulivo once, months ago. Claude gets it from your Ulivo account whenever it plans, so you don't repeat it in every new chat.
• The almond dinner never shows up. Ulivo's planner, not Claude, checks each recipe line by line. A dinner with almonds anywhere in it, a garnish included, is ruled out on nights Maya eats. Ask Claude to swap it in anyway and Ulivo refuses, with the reason. The details are in allergy-friendly meal planning.
• Tuesday fits the 20 minutes. Cooking times come from the recipes and your schedule, not from a guess.
• Maya's onions are handled. A food she never eats is a strict rule: a dinner with onion cooked in is ruled out on her nights, and an onion garnish the recipe marks optional is left off her plate. Things she merely dislikes are soft rules, so one picky eater doesn't shrink the menu. See meal planning for picky eaters.
• The list adds up. Quantities are scaled to who's eating, staples you have are removed, and the list is split by store and aisle. In the US, an Instacart link opens the list on Instacart's site; Ulivo never orders anything, and may earn a commission on what you buy there (affiliate disclosure). More in the grocery list guide.

The AI meal planner guide explains this split between conversation and planning in more depth.

What Ulivo will and won't do in Claude

Ulivo only gets the access you approve on the sign-in screen, and you can pick read-only. It never asks for payment in Claude: Plus is managed on getulivo.com. Sending an email invite to another adult is marked sensitive, so Claude should ask you before each one. Allergies and calorie targets are saved only with the account holder's consent and used only for planning (Privacy Policy). Text you type into a note is kept as plain text; if it reads like an instruction, Ulivo flags it and ignores it. To cut the connection, remove the connector in Claude or use Connected apps in your Ulivo account.