The Perfect Online Meal Planning App Is Missing
This is just an idea. The other night Becca and I were figuring out how to properly plan our meals out for the whole month. We try to save a little money and time by planning out everything before-hand and buying almost all of our groceries at the beginning of the month. Hopefully this will lead to increased efficiency, fewer trips to the grocery store, and less money spent on eating out. We are so close. Some things are missing from our scheme though, software. There is a great iPhone app for grocery lists, and there are some pretty good online apps for browsing recipes and generating shopping lists from them. Why no integration? Evernote - fail. Big oven - fail. Kitchen Monki - closest - but no iPhone app, and some real annoying problems. Tasty planner, also close, but small community and again no iPhone app. It seems so obvious to me that there should be a site with a recipe database - a calendar view planner just like Google Calendar - and a nice shopping list application. That shopping list application should have a nice iPhone version. Trying to hit those tiny check-marks on the lists in evernote or tasty planner are pretty much impossible.
In my mind the workflow would be like this: Start by browsing recipes - favorites, seasonal ingredients, and reccomendations based on ratings ala Netflix. Then, you drag and drop those recipes onto a day of the month, setting serving sizes at that point. After that you can print off a list based on a set range of dates, and of course access that list from your iPhone app. The calendar needs to be a little more interactive than the one at Kitchen Monki, you need to be able to drag meals around from day to day, and click on them to get a quick overview of the ingredients in that recipe. This way you can shuffle around your menu for the week when your plans change. Becca can get the menu in place during the day and then I can run to the grocery store after work and have the list that she prepared right on my iPhone, organized by isle, by store.
There are a lot more details I’d love to implement in my dream app, but you have to stop dreaming somewhere. Anyways, I doub’t this perfect integrated meal planning app exists, but I hope someone gets around to building it sooner or later. I certainly don’t have the time to do it… or do I…