№ 03 — Research

The math behind the menu.

Tanin's planning engine comes from research published at TU Eindhoven. Most users never need to read this — but if you're curious, here's what makes it work.

The problem in one sentence

Given a library of meals (each with a macro profile) and a target (calories, macros, variety, fixed slots, allergens), find the assignment of meals to days and slots that hits the target — exactly, fairly, and fast.

Why this is hard

It's a constraint-satisfaction problem with combinatorial structure. A 7-day plan with 3 meals/day from a library of 40 has billions of possible weeks. Brute force doesn't scale; greedy heuristics get the macros wrong; "AI" suggestion engines guess.

What Tanin does instead

Tanin formulates the problem as an integer linear program — the same family of optimisation used for airline crew scheduling and warehouse routing. The solver returns a provably optimal assignment in under a second for typical plans.