Ask HN: Meal Planning App?

[35mm]

How do you plan meals / food shopping?

I want to have a list of recipes which I rotate round every 4-6 weeks, which then creates a shopping list each week, minus any ingredients I still have in the fridge.

Does such a tool exist? All the meal planning apps are over complicated, focus on specific diets, and generally can’t seem to do this task.

[showsover]

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.

[srazzaque]

I'd also recommend giving Paprika a try. In the grand scheme of things it's "expensive" if you are used to free apps, but a small percentage of a typical grocery cost.

Whilst it has some UI quirks, you can tell its quite well thought out and nicely modelled. The cloud sync also works well between my wife and I (as mentioned by another comment).

Some niceties:

- Grocery list additions automatically get categorised by "Aisle" (e.g if you add "apples" it goes into "produce"). This makes shopping easier, as similar items are grouped.

- Recipes have ingredients, which can be selectively populated into your grocery list. Then, when you're looking down the list it maintains that "link" (ie I'm buying bread crumbs for xyz recipe), which is a +1 over pen and paper. This means if my wife gives me a list, but I cannot find an item, I'll at least know what that item was intended for so I can substitute.

[justusthane]

It can also do exactly what OP is looking for by creating a "menu" and then adding it to the calendar whenever you want to repeat it.

[alexchro93]

+1 for Paprika

It's great. Easily saves most recipes online. Allows you to tag them. You can schedule meals far out in advance from you personal recipe collection. From these scheduled meals you can create a shopping list.

I bought both the mobile and desktop (Windows) version. My fiance and I spend about 10 minutes a week discussing what we'd like to eat for the next 5-7 days. From there I schedule the meals in the app and, boom, I've got a shopping list. Super easy. I've put a lot of recipes from cook books in to the app.

We only use it for dinners and deserts, as breakfast and lunch are more predictable and repeatable.

Edit: another thing I like is that the app doesn't (yet, i think) require a subscription. to use it, after a trial period, is a one time payment

[joshstrange]

Paprika is an amazing app and worth every penny. I don't think people realize how much extra stress/cognitive load using recipes right off a website takes, why would they when they've never known anything else? Having all your recipes be in the exact same format, updatable as you learn what works/doesn't in a recipe, and easy access to tools like scaling in a consistent way feels like a super power. Add in meal planning and the grocery list feature (adding everything for a recipe to your list is super easy and you can just uncheck the stuff you already have when adding) and it's a powerhouse.

[pratyushag2]

Love Paprika for meal planning, saving recipes (and eating them), allows for easy modifications of recipe as well as web imports, and great interface for groceries. Definitely worth the price.

[thebricklayr]

Paprika is great. I’d much rather pay once upfront than for a subscription.

However, one thing that makes Paprika a no-go for our family is its inability to make shared collections of recipes, grocery lists, and meal plans. My wife and I want to cook together. We want to tweak our family recipes over time and share a single grocery list and meal plan between us.

Paprika can’t do that, and no other app comes close to Paprika in terms of features and payment model.

So, I’ve started building my own: Umami (https://www.umami.recipes).

Currently it’s just being used by my family and friends, but it’s starting to get to the point where I think other people might like to use it, so if you try it out please let me know what you think!

It supports shared collections of recipes and will soon have shared grocery lists and meal plans as well.

[hansbo]

It also works if you are more than one. Me and my wife have used it for several years now to sync shopping lists between us, to great effect.

[loufe]

One thing I found frustrating when I went on my own journey trying to find a platform like this for my partner and I a year ago was that NONE of these apps (Paprika included) worked with MicroG installed on my Android phone. If anyone has news regarding this having changed I would be ecstatic.

[brocket]

I understand not supporting Linux but they don't even have a web version which is a deal breaker for me.

[leokennis]

I like Paprika but it’s edging very close to abandonware territory.

Personally I switched to https://crouton.app but that won’t work if you’re on Windows.

[sh4rks]

Where has this app been my whole life...

[mustafa_pasi]

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.

[jader201]

You sound like you live alone, or at the very least cook your meals just for you. Because this doesn't seem like it would work at all if you're making meals for multiple people.

[mmcdermott]

I enjoy spontaneous cooking and eating, but meal planning is the only way I've been able to maintain a reasonable weight. The way I do it is that I cook meals (breakfast and lunch) for the work week on Sunday. I cook dinner the day of, mostly by keeping a set of staples around that I use to create different dishes. This last one has a little more spontaneity to it, but is still generally about selecting from meals I've already pre-calculated to work.

It is a lot less fun, but I've lost in excess of 50 pounds with meal planning + exercise. It is definitely more boring, but that's been an acceptable loss in the bigger picture.

[athenot]

This has been my experience as well.

What does seem to help is a blank sheet of paper on my fridge with the main things I have in it (meats, fishes, main perishables), and the various days I plan on fixing them. I generally enjoy cooking but sometimes after work my brain is just too fried to think and having a "sane default" helps me go on autopilot. With the sheet being structureles, I can annotate, cross-out, and change on a whim.

This also helps me keep track of freshness when I have things that go bad sooner than others.

[telesilla]

I'm similar, so when I go back to the store its to pick up what looks fresh, and use that in conjunction with what I have in the pantry or freezer. But I grew up where it wasn't possible to shop every day like you can in a city, so cooking must be a survival skill learnt under certain conditions?

[Maxion]

I used to be similar, but now when we have a child and both me and my wife work, things change. Life is much easier to handle when we have an idea of what to eat for the week and a shared shopping list.

This way, as the chaos of life occurs we can quickly alter who purchases what.

[viraptor]

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.

[birdmanjeremy]

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.

[view]

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

[saw-lau]

I use this (sometimes) and it's consistently given me good results, and it feels great to use everything up. Each meal plan typically contains three meals and has ingredient quantities for two or four people. As I live on my own, it's pretty easy to either prep and do the 'final' bits of cooking over two days, or for some recipes just freeze the second portion. Recommended.

[strife25]

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.

[nicoburns]

You should definitely request this feature via their customer support or similar. I've found small companies are often love hearing from their users and are quite responsive to these kind of requests.

[srazzaque]

Haven't tried PtE, may give it a go at some point.

But just mentioning Paprika does indeed allow you to populate your shopping list from your meal plan, or from an individual recipe. I use this feature frequently.

[oneshoe]

Came to the comments looking for this app - one of the very few apps I am happy to pay for and use a bunch!

[sudden_dystopia]

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.

[warrenm]

what is "chicken crust pizza"?

[cschiller]

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.

[dicroce]

So, I did this personal project a couple of years ago where I downloaded a big recipe database and then did a bunch of parsing / cleaning code to reduce each recipe down into a list of ingredients... Then I did an analysis of the ingredients to determine which were the most effective ingredients (frequently used in recipes) as it occurred to me that that this could be used to create a shopping list that enabled the most home cooking. The resulting list was ingredient list was fascinating... Salt & Oil were right at the top. Anyway, you might want to steer peoples shopping in the direction that enables the most meals for them.

[BasilPH]

I'm a happy user of Kitchenful and it has definitely saved me a lot of time when meal-planning. The recipes are tasty too.

I signed up just when they were still in the "e-mailing every client personally phase", and it's been a joy to talk to Christian and see their product improve.

[kelseyfrog]

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.

[mr337]

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

[horsawlarway]

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.

[chrismdp]

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!

[duval]

Just used your service to order from sainsburys based on this comment. Outstanding process, so simple. Put me in my partners good books! On the sign up I said I found you on hacker news. Thanks for posting here!

[okuntilnow]

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...

[ozzydave]

I use Grocery too, it has a nice markdown based format.

[dairylee]

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.

[sph]

I love this! Of course the solution is a lightweight plain-text markup, instead of proprietary solutions or mobile-only apps.

EDIT: there's also an Obsidian plugin: https://github.com/deathau/cooklang-obsidian

[CrlNvl]

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

[Dashron]

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.

[Errancer]

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

[mastazi]

I used that too, works well and IIRC the creator is on HN sometimes https://www.eatthismuch.com/

[NiagaraThistle]

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.

[slothtrop]

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.

[gibbh]

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.