How do you handle grocery shopping? Do you have resolutions to eat a little healthier in the year ahead? It can be tough to do, especially on a budget — but with New Year’s resolutions on everyone’s mind, there are apps that can help you stick to a new diet plan.
But making a change to your day-to-day routine is challenging. If you can’t figure out what to cook (or how to cook it), one of the apps on this list can help you not only plan out meals but also your shopping trips to get all the supplies you need. Here are the best meal-planning and recipe apps for both Android and iOS.
Looking for even more app-spiration? Check out our larger list of Android apps and the best iPhone apps.
PlateJoy (free with subscription)
If you’re looking to lose weight, PlateJoy is one of the best apps around. Designed and supported by nutritionists, it offers a subscription that’s a bit more expensive than some other apps on our list, although you could subscribe for free, depending on your health insurance provider. A subscription costs $69 for six months or $99 for 12 months. You can also go on a month-to-month plan for $13 per month, but that’s significantly more costly than the annual plan. Sign up, fill out a lifestyle survey, and PlateJoy’s nutritionists will tailor a unique, personalized meal plan just for you, complete with an automatically generated shopping list you can integrate with various grocery delivery services. Nutritionists also are available for consultation via phone or live chat, and you can sync the app with your FitBit to track calories. Meal plans are available for any lifestyle, including vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free, paleo, and many more. There’s a free trial, too, so you can see if the app is right for you before signing up.
MealPrepPro
MealPrepPro helps you save time and money shopping, planning meals, and cooking. The app offers a free trial, after which you pay a monthly $7 subscription (or choose an annual subscription to save money) that you can cancel at any time. Create nutritionist-approved meal plans customized to your fitness goals and dietary requirements, add a partner to your meal plans if you’re cooking for two, and get a weekly shopping list sorted by aisle, to save you time grocery shopping. Each recipe comes with a handy step-by-step video to help you cook, and the app integrates with Apple Health. Plans are available for a wide range of lifestyles and dietary needs including high protein, low-carb, vegan, gluten-free, and more, and you can filter for allergies like fish, eggs, peanuts, etc. MealPrepPro makes it really easy to set and track health goals — and the tailored meal plans mean no more calorie counting.
Big Oven (free)
BigOven makes it easy to gather all your favorite recipes in one central place and offers many ways to incorporate them into the app. It not only helps with mealtime inspiration, but it also assists in meal prep, grocery shopping, and incorporating leftovers into new meals. Clip recipes from your favorite sites or upload recipes by snapping a photo, or mark existing recipes as a favorite to save for later. Organize and filter recipes by category to find any recipe with seasonal collections or suggested dishes, or tap to save and share meal ideas. Add recipes to your planner, create a grocery list, and discover recipes with ingredients you already have to reduce food waste. The app sponsors a home-cooking community for additional ideas and feedback. It’s free to use BigOven but you can sign up for a Pro subscription for $2 per month or $20 per year, which gives you access to features like advanced search filters and custom folders to store your recipes.
Forks Plant-Based Recipes ($5)
Are you vegetarian, vegan, or aspiring to a plant-based diet? If so, Forks Plant-Based Recipes is the ultimate recipe app from the makers of the film Forks Over Knives. It features over 600 meals from 50 leading chefs, with new recipes added for free every week. Every recipe exemplifies the plant-based lifestyle that is increasingly recognized for its health benefits and humane treatment of animals. The app also features gorgeous high-resolution meal photos, instructions on how to prep featured dishes, ingredients, prep steps, a shopping list for each meal, and other tips for maintaining a meat-free diet.
MealPlan+ ($4)
MealPlan presents you with meal tags that you can drag and drop into a weekly schedule to quickly plan your meals (and even email them to other people). The tags make it easy to search for specific meals, and can automatically generate grocery lists for you. You can also tweak meals to add snacks, put in links to specific recipes, or remove certain meals entirely. You can search for new meals and generate a tag for them, too. There’s a learning curve, but it’s a fun system, particularly if you have an iPad or an Apple Watch.
MealBoard ($4)
Do you love to customize every little detail? Then MealBoard may be the app for you. It acts like many of the other apps on our list, with a search function for meals pulled from the internet, the ability to plan out meals on a calendar, and the option to generate a grocery list. But a couple of features make it unique: The interface is particularly pleasant to use and easy to customize, and there’s a pantry mode that allows you to move ingredients to your pantry when you buy them and remove them when you run out. You can also import meal plans and recipes shared by other users, and easily share your recipes, meal plans, or shopping list via text or email.
Eat This Much (free)
Here’s a different approach: If your primary goal is to lose weight, then Eat This Much encourages you to enter your food preferences, how much money you want to spend, your schedule, and how many calories the meals will contain. It will then generate meal plans for you and provide grocery lists for the ingredients. If you like cooking (as opposed to meal delivery) but want to develop healthier eating habits, this app could help you do just that. Recent versions add the option to count and generate food based on net carbs. Subscribers can now order groceries online through AmazonFresh. Food Search has been overhauled, allowing you to browse multiple categories of foods at once, with your favorites easier to find, while clarifying the distinction between different food genres. Sign up as a premium user and you’ll automatically receive a week of meal plans and an accompanying grocery list via email.
Paprika ($5)
Paprika makes the meal planning process interactive. Not only does the Paprika Recipe Manager 3 provide standard features like searching for recipes, forming lists, and meal planning for a certain amount of time, but it gives you tools to make the process more thorough. You can customize ingredients automatically, check each one off as they mix into your dish, and then publish recipe pictures.
If you’re serving a big group of people, the app will adjust ingredients amounts accordingly, but you can also ask it to scale according to serving size. Paprika makes your weekly trips to the grocery store more efficient by providing a customized and organized list by aisle. Newer app editions include a recipe description search, allowing you to find recipes even if you can’t remember the name. You can also import recipes from other apps, share recipes through email, and even start a timer with a single tap.
Mealime (free)
Mealime (no, not a typo) is designed around planning family or guest meals the easy way. You can create profiles of everyone you are cooking for, which can list likes, dislikes, general eating habits, allergies, and so on. You can also create profiles for couples or whole families to make planning a little easier. You can then look for recipes that match all those requirements. Pick one, and it gives you full instructions and can automatically add the necessary ingredients to your grocery list. Most recipes are focused on fast prep times around 30 minutes, so you may be able to save even more time in the kitchen. Recent updates to the app include new recipes, retooled older recipes, six-person servings and custom serving sizes, improvements to delivery integration with Instacart, revamped recipe descriptions and history, and the ability to share your list with other apps, print from your phone, or share with your family members inside the app.
Pepperplate
Pepperplate is a barebones application that takes all the muss and fuss out of meal planning and streamlines it with only the bare minimum necessities. You can manage recipes, create menus, plan meals, and make shopping lists all from this single app. Best of all, it works both on your phone and in a web browser, and it’s completely free. Pepperplate makes it simple to try out new recipes, share your favorites with friends, and scale ingredient counts up or down to fit your preferences. You can even import recipes from other websites, or manually enter them from your favorite cookbooks. This app still works and is still used regularly, but be aware that its last update was April 1, 2023. The app is still supported, but updates tend to be spaced out.
