Meal Planning App?

One app I haven't seen mentioned here yet is Paprika (https://www.paprikaapp.com/). I use it as a general storage for recipes that I tried and like as it's really easy to strip the entire lifestories you find in online recipes. It has a shopping list functionality as well as week planning.

The only downside is that it's quite pricey as you have to buy it seperately on each platform (ios, android, mac, pc). Personally I just have the ios version that works on both phone and tablet and use a browser bookmarklet to import recipes from my pc.

For me cooking and eating is very spontaneous. I also believe this is what separates people who can cook from those who cannot. I can cook because I can mix and match my current appetite, with what I have available in the fridge and figure out something out of that. I know the general idea behind many recipes and cooking techniques but I do not aim to reproduce them to the letter. Nor do I have some kind of meal plan for the whole week written down somewhere, because that would conflict with my daily appetite changes and whatever I have lying around in my fridge or what I stumble upon in the supermarket.

So to answer your question: I don't. I keep myself open and let myself be guided by my current appetite and my instinct.

I tried having a meal plan in the past and that just proved to be more of a hassle and incredibly boring.

I've tried way too many of those apps before settling on Anylist. It does basically what you want. A list of recipes, a calendar you put the recipes onto, and a shopping list that can be populated from a range on the calendar and preserves the item-recipe link so you know why things are there.

There are a couple of operations that are a little bit clunky, but everything else makes up for it.

I really like "Eat This Much". My partner and I have also been trying "Meal Prep Pro" which is a little prettier, a bit more expensive, and mobile only. The "Eat This Much" learning curve is a bit steeper, and it requires configuration, but it meets the "pantry leftovers" functionality you're looking for.

I have no association with "Eat This Much" other than being a customer and a fan.

Sidekick is an app which cuts down on food waste by creating weekly meal plans which use up all the ingredients that you buy.

https://sortedfood.com/sidekick/

They also run an awesome YouTube channel that is worth checking out:

https://www.youtube.com/c/SORTEDFood

I switched from Paprika to Plan to Eat this year and love it.

Https://plantoeat.com

It has the same features as Paprika but Generates a shopping list from your meal plan. Saves a ton of time when shopping.

The one thing I don’t like about PtE is you can’t mark off ingredients as you prep them. Paprika has this and I miss it.

I essentially gave up on meal planning and gave in to a meal schedule. Monday is burger night, Tuesday is taco bowls. Wednesday is something Italianish, Thursday is chicken crust pizza, Friday is free choice. It’s specific enough to know what sort of things I need for each night but vague enough that I can improvise a bit with each meal to give some variation.

If you are interested in getting weekly recipe ideas tailored to your preferences, easy to follow step by step cooking instructions, and a handy shopping list export / cart transfer to Amazon Fresh/Whole Foods Market feel free to check out Kitchenful (https://www.producthunt.com/products/kitchenful#kitchenful).

It's an app that I have built with my team over the last few months to streamline the cooking at home process.

I just use email. Let me explain.

My wife and I semi-asynchronously, find 3-4 recipes each and send each other links/(book,title,pg no) in chat. Then one of us drafts and email, referencing each recipe and the list of required ingredients, and finally sends it to both of us.

We then enter an order online for grocery pickup and stock the fridge. When we wish to make dinner, we reference the latest "menu" email and simply pick one of the items from the list.

Sometimes we'll chain menu items like chili -> chili dogs or tritip -> sandwiches, but for the most part it's operates like a grab bag for the week.

It's easy enough to go back and search for any old "menu" email as far back as we want and because everything is referenced by url or citation, we can add it to the next menu by navigating to the url or pulling the cookbook from the shelf.

The reference system work great during cooking too. I can pull up the recipe on my phone in the kitchen and follow the recipe there, or again, pull the cookbook from the shelf.

The flexibility of email is an advantage here. It works as a substrate for a process rather than railroading the process itself. You see, any app that replaced this would have to handle this specific workflow. It's easier to build a robust workflow on a flexible substrate than on a brittle bespoke substrate like an app.

I use Tandoor [2], and open source meal planning software. It is fully open source and be hosted in many ways including docker etc.

If you don't want to bother with self hosting they offer hosting plans as well [1].

[1] - https://tandoor.dev/ [2] - https://github.com/TandoorRecipes/recipes

I don't see them on here yet, so I'll throw these three in (they're all self-hosted, which might be a deal breaker for you):

The closest to what you're asking for that I'm aware of is probably Grocy: https://grocy.info/

Personally, I find that "keeping track of what you have" introduces a LOT of micro-management. Too much for me to enjoy, so while I used Grocy productively for a while, I eventually ditched it.

On the simpler side - There's Mealie (https://hay-kot.github.io/mealie/) and Tandoor (https://tandoor.dev/)

They both manage to import recipes fine, and do meal planning fairly well. Tandoor is a little closer to Grocy in that it's smart enough to group ingredients for your shopping list (mealie will generate duplicate entries for the same item if used in two different recipes), but otherwise they're fairly similar.

For UK people there's Lollipop: https://lollipopai.com (full disclaimer: I'm a co-founder :)

It's integrated with Sainsbury's with one-click basket transfer, an option to remove items you already have, and a recipe uploader for your favourites. Early days so feedback really welcome.

Happy to answer any questions people have!

I use Grocery on iOS for recipes and shopping lists. It does inventory management, but I don't use that so can't tell you how well it works.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/grocery-smart-shopping-list/id...

I'm in a similar situation as yourself and I've been looking to do something similar.

One tool I've had bookmarked for this is Cooklang (https://cooklang.org/) which seems to cover most of the needs.

I've tried a lot of different app, and mealime is the only one that clicked with me.

1. I'm reminded to pick meals on Sunday 2. I select a couple of interesting recipes and it creates a grocery list. The recipes are varied but not too varied to induce choice paralysis. Dietary restrictions are automatically applied from your account settings. 3. It has its own cooking mode with great features like "every step tells you exactly how much of an ingredient you need" and "hold your hand over the screen to progress" so I don't get crap on my phone.

I've been using it for over a month now and am still happy with it.

Here's my workflow:

1. Plan meal using Google Sheet, one tab per week. I now have 1.5 year of meals, so I can easily find old ideas

2. Add all ingredients in a ToDo app (using Microsoft ToDo currently)

3. Look in my fridge and drawers, mark any remaining ingredients as done.

4. Go grocery shopping

I used "Eat This Much" for a while and if i remember correctly it has those features in the premium version.

My son is a picky eater and his younger brother, though he eats everything, will follow his lead during dinners. Rather than continue the constant battle of wills to get my oldest to eat what we cook, I built a family meal planner. It allows me to add recipes, photos, type of cuisine (italian, indian, etc), and allows each family member to score the meal from 1-10.

Each meal is then automatically kept in rotation or dropped based on the score (i can keep ones my wife and I especially like even if the kids don't). Each family member can choose one meal for the following week, or I can generate a random list for existing meals. I can search by cuisine, ingredients, score, and a few other bits of data.

The app also will print out a weekly shopping list of ingredients based on meals selected, AND will take into account what ingredients I have on hand. However, although the app does provide an accurate list of ingredients, it hinges on me updating the ingredients I have in my pantry and I don't typically do this as it is manual and too time consuming - It was neat to do an initial inventory of ingredients when I built the app, and the app does subtract ingredients out when used in meals for the week, but i no longer update the ingredients when I purchase from store each week.

So if you know how to code, you code probably just roll your own as I did. Then it will have all the features YOU want. But as others have said here, there probably will be a solution out there that will meet your needs.

We have a selection of "go-to" recipes that we choose from every week, based on what we feel like. This is the compromise arrived to with my partner. How a recipe ends up on this list is one of us will try it out for a weekend dinner, and if it pleases both of us it's now part of the rotation. If I must, I modify a recipe to satisfy dietary wants (i.e. add more veg, swap some ingredients, etc). It's easier to find a solid, delicious recipe and play around with it, than to find one that hits specific dietary metrics and is also delicious to boot.

Most significantly, we plan for leftovers, such that a recipe covers at least 2 dinners. This way we can get through a working week only cooking twice. Disclaimer: this is more difficult if you're preparing for a family rather than two. At any rate, the advantage is we can sink in time for a more elaborate meal without it feeling like a slog. If we cooked every night, it would just be "sheet-pan, sheet-pan, stir-fry, casserole, dump your spice rack into it and hope for the best".

I use a recipe app, but the only value added I'm detecting from your request is copy-pasting ingredients from several recipes into one list. That's just text you already have.

My wife and I had the same challenge. So I decided to create an Android app for that. Funny enough I decided to name it Mealy. Guess I have to find a new name now I've seen there is a Mealie already...

I made it a native Android app instead of a web app because I wanted it to function offline with the data on the device. Too often I was in the grocery store and wanted to tick off the shopping list but didn't have any internet connection...

Unfortunately, it's not yet ready to share. It does already have a recipe database, shopping lists (which are not yet filled automatically) and meal planning for breakfast lunch and dinner with all that beeing synced to other devices. But it does still lack user management and does still have too many bugs and glitches.

And life's got too many other challenges at the moment so I do not have much time to develop it at the moment.

Edit: Also thought about implementing automatic generation of shopping lists omitting things which are still in stock but didn't find a good way of tracking what's still in stock without having too much work with keeping that up-to-date.

Anylist. https://www.anylist.com/

Their recipe + meal planner + grocery list (and general list planning) is killer. I love that I can share all of the above with anybody in my household that I want to.

Lists also integrate with Google Assistant so I can ask google to put stuff on the grocery list via voice.

Not the thing you asked for but there are services that sends you recipes & ingerdients. Hello Fresh is one example. It is more convenient and helps you to find new recipes and ingredients to use

Cons: They are skimpy in protein, more expensive and sometimes the ingredients are not the most fresh. But they often have a sign up discount, which makes it more affordable

I'm a powerlifter, so I create a "macros outline" - x oz of rice, y oz of chicken breast, z grams of fiber to hit my nutrition and then fill it in with mood/cuisine.

There's a reason why there isn't a successful app out there, since this is 1) highly personalized and 2) very tedious (manually inputting ingredients, etc).

I use Copy Me That (website/app), I am not sure if it has all the features you want, but I use it for storing recipes in a "no nonsense" format and can share recipes with friends/family. I get the impression if you pay you can do shopping lists etc but I haven't used that side of it to comment.

Have you considered a spreadsheet?

You can generate your rotation and plot it out 6 month in advance. And then see how long you can be bothered to follow a meal plan.

With regards to shopping lists I’m not sure how you imagine keeping an app up to date on what you already have, so I think that would be just as cumbersome regardless.

I use iOS Reminders to do a basic version of this.

Each of the meals on the list are a top level reminder on the Shopping List. All of the ingredients for that meal are an indented sub-item to that reminder list.

Each week my wife and I plan what meals we want to eat and "unselect" them from the reminder list (you have to choose: Show Completed) and then that automatically provides the shopping list.

Before we go shopping we check what we have in the cupboards and mark those off the list - the remainder is what we need to buy.

Each of the high level recipes has meta data with the link to the recipe if it's online or the main protein so that we can try to vary things as we plan.

And it's shared between us to-boot, so whenever one of us is near a supermarket and we're wondering if anything is needed we have a sync'd up shopping list in our pocket.

https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/mealime-meal-plans-recipes/id1...

Mealime. I can’t recommend it highly enough. I originally bought it because I liked the planned meals that have a nice overlap of ingredients, so you end up with a surprisingly small shopping list for a range of different meals

But also, the recipes are all a nice medium complexity: 99.9% of ingredients are easily available from any supermarket, even discounters

They clearly have a small number of chefs, so the recipes overlap in ways that really let you improve your skills. I went from so so in the kitchen, to decently skilled

It also lets you build plans based around what’s left in your pantry

Fantastic app. Take my money

I think investing knowledge in being able to confidently cook is better than anything software could ever offer in food value.

You really do need very little food to make a cheap, nutritious and satisfying meal.

The problem is updating the food repo it makes all the decisions off. Your food changes almost hourly -- not even just you eating snacks but certain foods being eaten by friends, food going off, accidents etc. This makes it nigh on impossible to account for without Sisyphean effort on the end user. Who can easily do this if they have a special diet as they're already committed to such a lifestyle change.

Being able to look at the a food stock and determine dozens of meals is a skill worth honing rather than pursing the "data entry" approach and letting the algo look after the rest.

Don't reinvent the wheel. It exists and well-done:

- https://github.com/hay-kot/mealie

- https://nightly.mealie.io/

Not an app, but I was frustrated with the same thing and was looking for apps of a similar nature too. I also started to make my own.

I found this [0] cooking blog that has atleast 90 meal plans.

My wife and I just pick them at random and kept the good ones in rotation.

Print them out - a page each recipe and one for the grocery list - do a quick cupboard check before heading to the shops, and store it in a clear plastic folder for next time. Rinse and repeat.

/Me Mumbles something about the time it takes to automate vs the time it takes to actually just do it

[0] https://tastesbetterfromscratch.com/

NB: we've since fallen off the wagon and now struggle to meal plan, but we would've done the same with an app as well!

This is something I'm super interested in and have been working on building something for some time.

I work out a lot and dabble in powerlifting / bodybuilding so I try to track my diet and workouts pretty closely. I haven't found any single app / tool that does everything I want it to.

I struggle with meal variety, shopping lists, and making sure N meals fit xyz macros.

I'm working on a tool where you can basically start from a super basic meal plan / grocery list and then expand the meal variety over time.

I'm also working on various methods of workout / goal tracking.

It's pretty far off from something I can release, even in MVP form, but if anybody is interested feel free to shoot me an email and I can add you to my list of potential early access / testers.

https://www.mealime.com/ is fantastic. I've been using it for years. It has saved us money and eat better, with plenty of variety in what we choose to eat each week. 10/10

Famnom's (https://www.famnom.com) MealPlanner allows meal planning for families optimizing for available foods / recipes in the kitchen, nutrition preferences (customizable) and taste preferences (customizable) (no shopping lists though).

Code's available at https://github.com/umangsh/famnom and https://github.com/umangsh/famnom_flutter if you want to run your own app and server.

I've been meaning to do a showhn on this, but this is pretty much exactly what I've been working on. https://www.reciped.io . Sort of a wikipedia of recipes, everything in markdown, add recipes to your recipe book, and then it's drag and drop weekly meal planning. Grocery list gets autopopulated by the meals in your weekly list and sorted by section in the grocery store (produce, meat, dairy, spice aisle, frozen foods, ect). Grocery list itself is built for mobile, so you just swipe the item off the list as you grab it at the store.

Everyone here's got you covered with standard meal planning apps. If you are VERY calorie conscious then the RP Diet App is unique here. The killer feature it has dividing your day's macros out amongst 2 to 6 meals and then balancing foods you choose to fit within those meals ideally. You kind of just need to play with it to see the utility. It makes planning the week out a piece of cake. The trade off here is that it is an incredibly rigid way to eat and not for the feint of heart. Certainly not for someone who has never tracked food before or even someone who is prone to eating disorders.

I'm actively working on (something) this in my free time!

I'm frustrated by all the freemium apps and want to release something completely free for full recipe/shopping management. To me, that's baseline functionality.

The main difference in your description is that the shopping list can be auto generated by selected recipes planned against a calendar. e.g. I want to cook these 5 recipes this week and my shopping list automatically aggregates to say "3 onions" instead of 3 separate entries for onions. I don't have a "pantry" yet but can very easily see that in the future.

I've settled on Apple Reminders (yes the stock one that ships with every Apple device).

For a month, I made lists for each shop I bought stuff from (costco, safeway, sprouts, etc) adding whatever I bought there. With those in place, the pain of grocery shopping is reduced to going through the list and picking the usual suspects.

One habit that made it even easier was to make sure the list is updated the moment I think I need to buy something. (iCloud sync across devices is a lifesaver here. Siri is also useful sometimes)

This extends to meal prep too. But that's not a problem I have today.

I look for no further solutions on this.

Spent a fair bit of time exploring this space as part of a design thinking class in 2020. We talked to a LOT of people from all over the globe about it.

No app really seems to do it PERFECTLY, and it's a complicated space because of the variability. We looked at many of the apps listed here and they all have pro's and cons. These pros and cons seem to align largely the personas we discovered during our process. IIRC the stickiest users seemed to be athletes or folks on highly restrictive diets.

The best we could figure out is a quiz on what ingredients remained before generating a grocery list.

Copy Me That is the best I’ve found so far. Done by a single developer, I believe, and it’s been around forever.

https://www.copymethat.com/

I know the app "Jow" which is mostly used to create a chosen number of meal and to give you the exact quantity of ingredient needed from preparing the meal (with recipe instruction) and not so much "designed" for planning, but I use it for planning what I will eat for each weeks : https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.wishop.dev...

I've been using Mealtime [1] for a few weeks now and it's been a game changer - literally!

Every meal is different, simple, and healthy; and it's removed the hassle of having to figure out what to cook and what to buy.

It integrates with online groceries, but I believe it may only be available for the UK, unless the list of supermarkets changes based on location.

I'm not affiliated with them at all, just a happy customer

[1]: https://www.mealime.com

Mealie is a great self-hosted solution: https://github.com/hay-kot/mealie

You should definitely checkout https://www.eatthismuch.com/

We use an Airtable with a simple script block[0] for generating the shopping list. Its a bit cumbersome to input all meals/recipes, but unless you are constantly adding meals to your rotation it works really well.

[0] https://gist.github.com/Raudius/f24b9718c5bcb88eedc03bc8a5fa...

Coopes is exactly what you are thinking about. There is a one time purchase available to enable a sync feature with family members, otherwise it is completely free: https://apps.apple.com/de/app/coopes-der-essensplan/id155508...

Haven't seen it mentioned yet so might as well post it,

https://www.mysaffronapp.com/

This app made by Ben Awad seems to cover all your needs. It's free for up to 25recipes and after that it's 5$/month for 1k recipes, it has both mobile and web versions.

Edit: it also has a pretty neat recipe scraper feature

I can't say enough good things about EatThisMuch.com

Been using it since 2019 to fantastic results, tweaking my diet to both gain and lose weight as appropriate.

Edit: additionally this works internationally reasonably well, though I do find the odd ingredient that seems to be specific to the United States in some of the recipes, but usually easily swapped out and saved as a custom receipe.

I personally use Crouton (https://crouton.app). I don't really use the meal plan function at the moment, but the recipe organiser etc. are all amazing. The dev is also active and adding new features consistently. It's only available on Apple platforms though.

It's not an app, but I'm a huge fan of Struggle Meals. It helps reduce analysis paralysis in the kitchen, focusing on keeping important staples in the house and working with whatever you have on hand.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbW6O-ZFbMc

The Renaissance Periodization diet app is the best app I've ever used. It's main goal is to help you plan the number of calories and macronutrients in your meals for bodyweight-based goals. However, it has the shopping list, recipes, and meal planning that you want also. Best UX I have ever had with any of these apps by far!

I started using an app called Intent -- it seems to support a lot of these features. I've been very impressed with it.

What a weird coincidence that I just read this comic https://www.achewood.com/index.php?date=05082002 a few minutes ago and started thinking about a practical version of it, then stopped over at HN and found this thread.

Your process sounds exactly like mine, down to the weekly shopping list, so you're going to like the app I built for myself: https://mealdj.com/

The documentation is a work in progress, but given that you already have the process down, that may not matter!

A plain old Google Doc (or Notion, Dropbox Paper, even Apple Notes would do). I have two sections.

1. Table of cooking for the next week or so

2. Checklist for groceries

That's it.

I poked around at apps or building something and eventually concluded it just added complexity, and the classic, generalist tools are actually fantastic and less work than something tailor-made for the job.

We used to do eMeals

After a couple years, we unsubscribed, but kept all the PDF weekly planners we'd paid for

The prices may not be correct anymore, but the shopping lists for the meals haven't changed :)

Alternatively, you can just do what my family did when I was a kid - tuna casserole night, spaghetti night, hot dog night, pizza night, etc

Try out https://letscooktime.com . I built this to help track recipes, create aggregated shopping lists, show you nutrition facts, and it all works desktop and mobile.

If you find any issues or have a feature request, I can make it happen.

That is 4 applications in one:

1. App to write down known and tried recipes ( for reference when you cook ) (EnRecipes)

2. Recipes, for ideas ( any cook book )

3. App to rotate written down recipes for healthy diet. based on app 1. data ( ??? )

4. App to take care of shopping list and fridge, based on app 1. and 3. data ( ??? )

Plan to Eat is pretty good overall. Cheap, good for planning meals and importing recipes.

For me this needs to work with Apple’s Calendar and Reminders.

Currently I’ve got a series of shortcuts that do almost all of this; the recipes stored in a notes folder.

The diffed shopping list is the only missing part, you’d have to keep track of fridge inventory somehow.

I was searching for exactly the same thing and even thinking about building it myself

What I need is one that can tell me the macros for bulking/cutting in the quantity of meals per day that can be set (5-7). If with these macros restrictions it can give you tasty recipes then that's the one app.

Are there any meal planning apps where I can just use my phone video feed to capture what's in my fridge and cupboards with object recognition and will then spit out meal options?

I've recently released a meal planner designed for bodybuilders. It has no recipes, only basic foods.

Its name is Gaintrain: https://gaintrainapp.com

I've managed to do all my meal prepping for years without an app, and I don't think I'll be needing one now.

There are recipes I sometimes consult online, but otherwise, I have most of the information in my head.

In France, https://jow.fr does all of it and even let you order all the groceries directly from the app. I always use it since i discovered it.

For these kinds of things you're usually better off hacking it together by yourself.

Existing software is either as you said

A) Too focused on a certain feature, and will lack some specific feature you need

B) Too broad and therefore too overcomplicated.

I'm a big fan of Paprika paprikaapp.com, have been using it for years and doesn't require a subscription

I use the sync function with my wife (logged into the same account) to manage shopping lists and recipes

In case you are into self-hosting, although Mealie's (https://mealie.io) main feature is recipes, it also has a meal planner.

Do you want the app to be able to tell when your ingredients are likely to run out? The creation of a shopping list minus pre-existing ingredients seems to be the trouble spot there.

I have a couple of recipe books that are organised by what vegetables are in season, and I work through them through the year. It saves me a ton of money and everything tastes nicer.

https://freshrecipes.netlify.app/ if you like hello fresh recipes

A lot of great suggestions here, but does anyone know if one learns how to order the shopping list for your supermarket?

AnyList has categories, and I think you can organize them.

I so nearly made this a few years ago as I do the same thing….. then life got in the way.

I think it would be useful but probably not profitable.

I recommend Whisk

I need something like this too. Because I've been spending times ordering food for almost half an hour.

There are a few iPhone apps to do that.

I'm currently testing Crouton and RecipeChef.

So far it works really well.

Buy an Instant Pot. Learn Instant Pot recipes. Easy peasy.

I use a self hosted instance of Mealie on my Pi

i would get a girlfriend or a wife for this, not an app, and that is because i suck at cooking.

I think dBase II can do that.

My so uses Mealime

RP Diet App