The Mealplanner Story

The Mealplanner Story

It's 2021, we're being told to lock down, don't mix socially, shopping in person has become something you do with a mask and a bottle of high alcohol handwash... You get the picture, we all remember those days. As a family we made some changes to our routine. No longer did we do a weekly shop, that changed to a "click and collect" where the only contact was packing items into bags at the back of my car. We bought a chest freezer for the shed to allow us to have a stock of frozen food (dog food mostly), "just in case" - just in case the shelves were empty, as often they were.

Out of these changes came a system, a process to help ensure less food was wasted and only buy what we need. It started as a spreadsheet, I listed all the meals I cook - which surprised me because there were more than I thought. This became a 6 week rotation, 30 or so different meals spread over 42 days with some effort not to have similar dishes on adjacent days. There had to be duplication, I didn't have 42 recipes but we used this approach for 2 years and food waste dropped significantly - as did the weekly shopping bill.

After some time I started looking for new recipes, meals that were within my reach technically. Nothing too adventurous at first and then gradually trying new things. Looking for meals by region, or finding a source of recipes and just having a go. Where I found a good recipe, or a video showing the meal being prepared, I copied the link into my spreadsheet to help remind me how to cook it.

Four years passed. We'd increased from a 6 week rota to 8 weeks but it was getting stale. We would make it as we went and just have what we fancied instead of what was on the menu. Something had to change.

I decided to write a system that I could use to plan the meals using a calendar to show the meals per day, allowing me to take photos of my meals to remind me "what did that look like?". I wanted to have the links to the videos and recipes and quickly a system took shape.

Now I found it was summer and being offered Beef Stew, a winter warmer, was not appropriate. I decided to set which seasons a meal would be available to the random selector. At the same time I added which days of the week after turning down Sunday dinner on a Wednesday too many times.

This worked and slowly I was building up a gallery of images and adding to the recipes I found I could cook. I added ingredients, not like 1 teaspoon of this or 200g of that, I just wanted to know what I need to buy or rather order for delivery as we'd evolved from click and collect to home delivery at this stage. After planning 7 meals for the coming week I could now list what I needed to buy. I added types like pantry, fridge, fresh - what do I need to buy and what do I need to check if I have any in the cupboard. It was taking shape as a system.

On a Friday evening, I would sit down with my wife and get the system to generate a menu for the coming week. "Do you fancy this or that?" and a 7 day list would be added. As a result, the shopping list was generated and checklist to confirm we had flour or frozen peas for example.

Then the thought occurred to me "this is actually quite useful". With a few extra features I thought this system could be used by anyone. No pressure to stick to a recipe, no pressure to name a dish by its correct name. Call it what you call it in your house, add frozen chips because you don't fry your own, put an egg on top because that's how you roll. Be the head chef in your own kitchen!

So here we are, I have a tool that makes it easy to plan what you're going to eat next week - your meals the way you cook them and the names you call them. It gives you a shopping list that you can copy and paste and share with whoever just popped to the supermarket. It lets you copy the photo of your dish to share on Facebook (people do), it lets you copy the recipe to share on Pinterest. It lets you share your favourite recipes with others so they can add it into their list to increase their repertoire. And it presents it all on a calendar view so you can look back and say "we haven't had take away for 3 weeks ... just saying :)".

I've made it available to everyone and the basic system is free. You need to sign-up so we can store your recipes for you but you won't need to pay anything or add credit card details. Sign up and try it for free, you can store up to 20 recipes and get them from the community page if you don't want to add your own yet. Have a go, see what you think!

Enjoy