Who can see the pantry? A guide to household permissions
The NestBoard team · 2026-06-18
The short answer
When you add someone to your household, they can see almost everything. Pantry items, medication bottles, meal plans, savings goals—these are shared spaces, not personal ones. We built it this way because a household operates on shared information.
The exceptions are narrow and deliberate. Kid accounts can't edit financial goals or delete other people's medications. Kiosk mode hides some screens entirely if you're using a public-facing tablet. But the baseline assumption is transparency.
Why shared by default
We've watched families struggle with apps that treat every piece of information like a secret. One parent adds milk to the shopping list, another doesn't see it, someone buys duplicates. A grandparent visiting for the week can't check if the kids have taken their vitamins because they're locked out of the meds module.
Friction compounds. So we start from the opposite direction: if it's in the household, it's visible to the household.
That includes the pantry. Everyone can see what's stocked, what's expiring soon, and what's running low. It also means anyone can add or remove items. If your teenager finishes the oat milk, they can mark it gone. If your partner finds a forgotten jar of tahini in the back of the cupboard, they can log it.
What kids see
Kid accounts see the pantry, the meal plan, and their own chores. They can check what's for dinner, browse recipes you've saved, and mark off tasks when they're done.
They can't see financial details like household savings goals or allowance balances for other kids. They also can't delete medications that aren't assigned to them. Everything else—calendar events, shared shopping lists, family photos Robin helped you organize—is visible.
Why kid accounts work differently goes deeper into the reasoning, but the principle is consistency. Kids are part of the household. They see what the household is doing.
Medications are a little different
Meds work on a bottle model, not a person model. If you add a vitamin D bottle to the household, everyone who takes vitamin D can log doses from that same bottle. It's shared inventory, which means it's visible to everyone in the household.
We wrote about this shift in Shared bottles, shared meds: why we changed how supplements work. The upshot is that privacy lives at the household level, not the medication level. If someone's in your NestBoard household, they can see the med list.
When you want more control
Kiosk mode is the only tool we offer for limiting what's on screen. Turn it on and the tablet shows calendar and chores—nothing else. It's designed for households that leave a tablet in a semi-public place and don't want visitors scrolling through pantry inventory or meal plans.
We don't offer per-item visibility toggles, and we probably never will. That kind of granularity makes sense for work software. It doesn't make sense for a household, where the question is usually "Does everyone know we're out of bread?" not "Who is authorized to know about the bread?"
The underlying idea
A household isn't a hierarchy. It's a group of people who need to coordinate around the same milk, the same calendar, the same front door. Shared visibility is the tool that makes coordination possible.
If you add someone to your NestBoard household, you're saying: this person is part of the operation. They can see what we have, what we need, and what we're planning. That's not a bug. It's the point.