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Ask HN: Meal Planning App?

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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.

140 comments

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htaunay
In case you are into self-hosting, although Mealie's (https://mealie.io) main feature is recipes, it also has a meal planner.
danmol
+1 for Mealie. Really easy to self-host as you can just run it in a docker container and it's got all the features in there.

For example, here's mine which I don't really use or meal planning, only for recipes, but it does have more than plenty of meal planning features built-in as well

http://fulgerica.recipes

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.

_int3_
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 ( ??? )

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.

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.
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.

sh4rks
Where has this app been my whole life...
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.
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

lucretian
how do you get cookbooks recipes into the app? manual transcription or something easier / more efficient, i hope?
mjakefranklin
I type them in manually, and bought the desktop version specifically to make this easier. It's painful, but since there's decent data export options, I'll hopefully never have to do it again
IanCal
These days it's pretty easy on a phone. I take a picture with google lens and copy the text.

Easier is finding the same recipe on their website and importing that directly.

lucretian
helpful, thanks. seems like it still needs an extra step. i was hoping that the paprika app had this native functionality so you can scan right into the app (i'm not a tech guy but i assume that there are OCR APIs out there...?)
thex10
There's an in-app web browser, and you can click "download" on most recipes from most websites and it will automatically parse the recipe (you can edit where needed) and save it to your recipes. It works perfectly without intervention from my part virtually all the time.

They also offer a bookmarklet (anyone remember those?), which I remember working well in Safari.

lucretian
yeah, i saw that. i'm interested in how to transcribe paper recipes. i have a lot of cookbooks that i under-utilize at time of meal planning b/c they're captured in a "dumb" format, and I don't want to page through 15 books every weekend.
klokovoz
I recommend googling "name of cookbook" "name of recipe" and then you can usually find some blog post that took that recipe and "adapted" it, which usually means they just took the original and wrote a blog story around it.
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.
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.
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.

jihadjihad
It looks great so far, thanks for building this. I think this will really streamline how my recipes are stored on my phone (iBooks PDFs, screenshots in iCloud, bookmarks, etc.). Recipe sites have really gone downhill with all the ads and life stories...I just want to cook dinner!
thebricklayr
Thanks for giving it a try!

> Recipe sites have really gone downhill with all the ads and life stories...I just want to cook dinner!

Couldn’t agree more. I think having a way to import recipes without the fluff is a table stakes feature for any recipe app (and was the very first part of it I built).

IanCal
> 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.

Unless you want fine grained control over this (what to share, what not to share) then paprika supports this just fine. It syncs between multiple devices so you can just add more - that's what I do.

thebricklayr
Are you just sharing the same login? I suppose that works, but it’s not ideal, especially for things like sharing a collection of cocktail recipes with my friends (which I’m actually doing now with Umami).

I just checked Paprika again. There is no way to share a folder/category of recipes with someone else. Sharing each recipe individually is not really what I want to be doing either.

thex10
I'm not the previous poster, but just wanted to chime in that my husband and I just share a login and yeah, it works. Good enough for us! But Paprika definitely doesn't lend itself to sharing multiple recipes with others in any efficient manner.
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.

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

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.

Cub3
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

phixxx5
I was searching for exactly the same thing and even thinking about building it myself
massysett
I have built this myself. It’s been evolving for ten years now and started as a motley pile of XML and shell scripts. Now it’s an SQLite database and a Haskell program to drive it. I use GNU roff to print the grocery list.

I won’t claim this saved any time over using some app, but it does work exactly how I want it.

phixxx5
I was thinking a bit more modern in the direction of an android app built with Flutter
ssss11
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.

onion2k
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.
jamesgreenleaf
What are the titles of those books?
onion2k
"Riverford Companion Spring and Summer" and "Riverford Companion Autumn and Winter"
ngetchell
I recommend Whisk
gpmcadam
+1 for https://whisk.com

One feature that might not be obvious, at least here in the UK, is that it has integrations with most online supermarkets so you can relatively painlessly add your recipe shopping list to your online basket.

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.
leodr21
There are a few iPhone apps to do that.

I'm currently testing Crouton and RecipeChef.

So far it works really well.

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

drekipus
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!

Cjcrew
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

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