How Mealime worked.

What is Mealime?

Mealime is a meal-planning app organised around a repeating plan, shop and cook routine. This retrospective follows its official 2019–2020 help guides, while separating those instructions from its current wind-down.

As of 12 September 2026, closure is still ahead: Mealime says it will discontinue the app on 21 October 2026. Pro features are now free, with no further subscription fees. Its official announcement directs users to free Meals Hub for the continuing recipe catalogue and planning tools.

A recipe, a favourite, a plan and a list serve different purposes. An independent copy of one dish does not also preserve where you placed it this week, the household extras on your list or the private note that made it work better.

The first job: deciding what to cook.

The diet guide, updated 11 January 2020, puts menu selection under Settings → Eating preferences. It says changes apply when you create a new plan. Keep diet type, restrictions and dislikes distinct; our preference guide explains those controls.

The 3 December 2020 Getting Started Guide describes two planning routes:

• Automatic: choose the number of meals, review a suggested combination, swipe for another, then build the plan you want.
• Choose yourself: add dishes with their plus buttons, then build the plan and review individual serving sizes. You could also select a few dishes before asking the automatic builder to fill the remaining places.

The useful result was fewer dinner decisions to make later. The remaining work was deciding whether those dishes suited the people, equipment and evenings you actually had. A plan containing four appealing recipes could still be unrealistic for a week with only two nights at home.

The second job: making one usable list.

Mealime’s grocery-list guide, updated 29 July 2019, describes a list generated for the new plan, organised into shopping categories. First check off ingredients already in your kitchen; then mark the remaining items as you buy them. The same guide says building a new plan replaces that list, which makes finishing or saving the current shop important before moving on.

If an ingredient was unclear, the ingredient-details guide from the same date directed mobile users to tap the ingredient’s centre rather than its checkbox. That view provided sizing guidance, substitutes and the recipes using the ingredient. This linked the shopping decision back to dinner.

The store still determined available brands, pack sizes and substitutions. The 2020 retailer instructions separated list preparation from checkout: its Kroger example handed the user to the retailer to choose fulfilment and pay. Building a meal plan was not placing a grocery order. See the delivery guide for current route checks.

Follow a small week through the routine.

This worked example uses generic dishes for a two-person household. The meals and quantities illustrate planning decisions rather than named Mealime recipes.

For a simple quantity example, suppose two dishes need 1 onion each and you already have 1. The plan needs 2 onions; the shopping requirement is 1 more. If the shop sells only a bag of 3, you will have 2 left after those dishes. Combining requirements helps expose the overlap, but a useful plan still needs a choice about the remaining onions.

Where the routine helped, and where work remained.

The strength of this sequence is continuity: dinner choices lead to shopping quantities, and the purchased ingredients lead back to the method. Its friction appears at the boundaries. Plans change after a shop, products come in inconvenient packs, and personal preferences may require manual review. These are practical consequences of the workflow, not measured savings or evidence that every plan eliminates waste.

The third job: following the method.

The cooking guide, updated 29 July 2019, starts from the recipe card in the meal plan and separates cookware, ingredients and instructions. It also describes a focused mobile cooking view and marking the dish cooked with Done. The cooking-mode guide explains the device-specific controls.

That structure helps answer three concrete questions: do I have the equipment, do I have the ingredients, and what happens next? Read the complete method before starting so a single-step screen does not conceal preparation you need to do first.

For a change worth repeating, the 29 July 2019 notes guide documents recipe → More → Add Note → Done. Keep those personal notes separately when backing up a public recipe link. A remembered adjustment is part of your cooking routine even when it is absent from the published dish.

How to keep the useful routine.

If familiar Mealime dishes are the priority, Meals Hub is the official continuation. It supports recipes, plans and lists through Albertsons Companies apps and websites even without a nearby store. The closure notice says some settings must be established directly there; it does not promise the complete private account will move.

For a MealPot recipe import, the current Pro flow is Recipes → + → Import Recipe → review → save to My Recipes. This is one recipe at a time. Review the method and amounts, retain your personal notes and rebuild the plan you actually want. The free browser backup instead creates a separate TXT or JSON file; it does not import an entire account into the app.

Choose the part of the routine you most want to retain: suggested dinners, a collection you select from yourself, an understandable shopping list or a readable cooking screen. The switch checklist helps you carry one familiar dinner through the complete process before moving more.

Frequently asked questions