Family Meal Planning Made Easy With These 11 Apps
Estimated reading time: 15 minutes
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Download any of these must-have family meal planning apps and make food prep for the fam easier and more efficient. Keep reading to find out more.
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11 Must-Try Family Meal Planning Apps
1. Lasta
Lasta is an app that offers personalized recommendations and guidance for improving eating habits, individual intermittent fasting programs, and a variety of meal plans. The family meal plans are a unique offer of the application. Experts take into account all individual needs when creating a nutrition plan. Lasta app also includes a tracking feature to check their progress over time.
Features and Benefits
- Easy-to-use interface: It allows users to record their meals, weight, and exercise levels in a single place.
- Pick your type and follow the tried-and-true advice: Our nutritionists have carefully studied each type of meal planning and compiled individual meal plans that remove all the guesswork from popular diets.
- Pre-set meal plans, grocery lists, water trackers, tracking calories, and more: Our features include tracking daily emotions, physical activity, eating habits, and thoughts about your appearance.
- Mindful eating: The app helps you take a mindful break from screen time and focus on what is important – the food you are eating. Represents the “healthiness” of food to your program, goals, and personal dietary preferences.
- The app has over 4000 recipes for different food types, including vegan.
Reviews
2. MealBoard
MealBoard is a fully customizable tool that combines meal planning, recipe management, groceries and pantry management in one amazing app.
Features and Benefits
- Digital Pantry — It comes with a “Digital Pantry” where you can log and keep track of your ingredients and recurring meals.
- Assists in Meal Planning and Grocery Shopping — Busy parents who like to make the most out of their weekly or monthly groceries will definitely love MealBoard. It can check your grocery list and meal plans and will recommend other meals based on the leftover ingredients from the list.
- Import from Other Apps — If you are currently using another app for your recipes, you can easily import them to MealBoard, too!
OS: iOS
Price: $3.99
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3. Ultimate Meal Plans
Ultimate Meal Plans is an all-in-one meal plan app that will take away the burden of planning healthy meals for your family every day and will allow you to spend that time doing the things you love!
Features and Benefits
The app was built for ease of use and efficiency. It works in 3 simple steps:
- Customize your perfect meal plan: choose a diet, select portion size, exclude ingredients you don’t like, and UMP will personalize your perfect meal plan;
- 1-click order and delivery: Get a weekly shopping list with all the ingredients you need for your meal plan. Select your preferred grocery store, and the rest is handled.
- Cook delicious recipes & enjoy: All recipes can be made in 15 minutes with no more than 5 ingredients.
You can download the app for Android and get the following benefits with your membership:
- Weekly Customized Meal Plans;
- 15-minute, 5-ingredient recipes;
- Access to huge meal plans library (keto, paleo, AIP, low carb, and more);
- Instant online shopping integration;
- Over $300 of Partner Discounts;
- Money-back guarantee.
Price: Free trial version of any plan — get 2 weeks of meal plans, cancel anytime. After that, $8 per month for an annual membership, or monthly and quarterly plans.
4. Mealime
Mealime is food planning app designed to make food prep for families or guests easy and convenient.
Features and Benefits
- Profiling Feature — It has a very helpful profiling feature that let you list general eating habits, allergies, likes, and dislike of everyone you are cooking for. Making profiles for whole families and couples is also possible.
- Recipe Matching — The app allows users to easily look for recipes that match each profile’s data. The app has recipes with easy-to-follow instructions and can automatically include the needed ingredients to your grocery list.
- Fast Meal Prep Recipes — If you don’t have much time to spare in the kitchen, the majority of the in-app recipes are focused on fast meal prep times at around 30 minutes.
Price: Free, but paid features are also available
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5. Paprika Recipe Manager 3
Aside from being a great recipe tracker and grocery list keeper, Paprika also allows users to keep any recipes available online. If you get most of your recipes from Pinterest, you’ll love Paprika.
Features and Benefits
- Save Recipes on the App — Simply look for a recipe you want, then save it on the app.
- Ingredient Scaling — When you’re ready for the kitchen action, this app can also scale the ingredients in the recipe based on how big the family is.
Price: S4.99
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6. Cozi
Cozi Family Organizer is a great tool for parents who like to efficiently keep track of everything. It’s the ultimate family organization app that comes with an add-on dedicated for meal planning.
Features and Benefits
- Android and iOS Compatible — The Cozi Recipe Box and Dinner Planner apps are available for both Android and Apple.
- Import Online Recipes — Has an import feature that lets you search recipes online and directly connect them directly to your profile.
- Shopping Lists and Calendar Integration — You can also create shopping lists for your recipes and add them to your calendar to have a bigger picture of your weekly or monthly family meal plan.
- Cooking Mode — For uninterrupted cooking sessions, the app also has a “Cooking Mode” allowing your screen to remain lit for the recipe. It can be linked to multiple devices too.
Price: Free, but paid features are also available
Reviews
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7. FoodPlanner
FoodPlanner is a recipe-based meal planning app that allows you to search for recipes online and save them onto the app.
Features and Benefits
- Displays Nutritional Data Information — It can generate the nutritional data of meals and automatically give you a shopping list.
- Inventory Feature — If you want to keep track of your weekly or monthly supplies, you can benefit from its inventory management feature, too.
- Create Original Recipes — FoodPlanner also allows you to create your very own recipe from scratch and save them in the app.
Price: Free, but paid features are also available
Reviews
8. MealPlan+
MealPlan+ prides itself with its easy-to-use interface that allows users to plan out a week’s menu in just five minutes.
Features and Benefits
- Easy Calendaring — Making a weekly meal plan is made easy with the drag-and-drop calendar system of MealPlan+ drag and drop calendar system. Simply choose recipes from the suggested meal tags and add them to the family’s schedule—you can even send the meal plan out via email.
- Grocery List — Like most of the listed apps, it can also generate a grocery list for you.
- Customize Meals — It allows you to quickly tweak meals to add snacks, include recipe links, or remove certain meals according to the family’s plans. This app can help you be on top of your family’s nutrition.
- Apple Watch and iPad Compatible — If you have an Apple Watch or iPad, you’ll enjoy this app.
OS: iOS
Price: $3.99
Reviews
9. Yummly
With an extensive library of recipes, Yummly can provide your family delicious recipes suited for their dietary restriction and preferences.
Features and Benefits
- Meal Sorting Feature — It has almost anything from main courses to desserts and you will find its sorting feature very useful when picking from a sea of choices.
- Instacart Integration — One notable capability of Yummly is its integration with Instacart, a same-day grocery delivery service with a variety of store partners. You can have ingredients (which the app can also generate) delivered right to your door for utmost convenience.
- Intelligently Predicts Recommended Recipes — The app can also predict which recipes you might like based on your “yumming” activity. Think of it like liking a post on Facebook.
- Video Guides — It houses some helpful video guides too.
Price: Free
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10. BigOven
Features and Benefits
If you want something straightforward and simple, BigOven is a good ‘ol recipe keeper where you can save the blueprints for your precious creations or other favorite recipes.
- Various Ways to Add Recipes — You can do this by typing them, copying them from the internet, uploading a photo, or clipping recipes from websites.
- Recipe Ideas Based on Dietary Restrictions — Have dietary restrictions? BigOven has a wide variety of recipes to cater to different dietary restrictions, such as gluten-free or low-carb.
Price: Free, but paid features are also available
Reviews
11. Lala Lunchbox
Deciding what to kind of lunch to pack for young school kids can be challenging and tricky. There’s actually a fun kid-friendly app that can help you with this task — Lala Lunchbox.
Features and Benefits
- Teach Kids About Nutrition in a Fun Way — The Lala LunchBox app employs the science of getting kids’ attention through the use of colors and animation. It is an incredible app can teach your kid which foods are best for lunch in a fun and educational way.
- Involve Kids in Meal Planning — They’ll have you set up a profile and choose a monster they like. Then they can set up their own lunch under categories. The kids can decide what they want for lunch and feed their cute monster pet after.
OS: iOS
Price: Free, but paid features are also available
Reviews
Here are the two apps to help you on meal planning in this video from Good Day Sacramento:
There are many benefits in planning out meals — you get to plan healthier meals, cut calories and costs, feed the family a lot faster, and avoid waste. These aren’t easy feats to accomplish, so having all the help you need is important. And with some of the best apps for meal planning not even costing a cent, it won’t be a waste to download one of these apps today.
Do you know any other free meal-planning apps? Share them with us in the comments section below!
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