A meal plan generator that plans from your own dinners

An example week

This is an illustrative example, not a recorded run. The household, its meals and the plan below are made up to show what the generator is given and what comes back. A real week depends on your own library and settings.

The household: two adults and two children, weeknight cooking set to quick, and one member who avoids nuts. Their library has nine dinners. Two notes are pinned to the week: Thursday says "Swimming 6 to 7, home at 7:15" and Saturday says "At Gran's all day." Tacos have landed on most recent Tuesdays and pizza on most Fridays.

Above the week, the app shows a short note on why the plan looks the way it does. For this week it would read something like:

"Quicker dinners sit on the school nights, with egg fried rice on swimming night and the roast saved for Sunday. Tacos and pizza keep their usual nights, and Saturday is left free because you're at Gran's."

Three meals in the library didn't make the week. The AI passed over the sausage and bean casserole and the vegetable chilli for variety. It never saw the pesto pasta: FamilyPlate held that meal back because its ingredient list includes pine nuts and someone in the household avoids nuts. Saturday stays empty because the note says nobody is eating at home. The app says so in plain words rather than counting it as a missed day.

From here, Regenerate would re-plan the week with a different rotation, and Something else… with "no fish this week" would re-plan it without the salmon. Undo puts back the week you had before. With Pro, the shopping list for the six dinners builds itself.

On a brand-new account

With nothing saved yet, there is no library to plan from, so the generator writes a starter dinner from scratch for each open day. They follow the same diet settings and day notes, and each one is saved to your library with a short description, tags and an ingredient list. The app doesn't write the method up front. It looks it up the first time you open the meal, so you only wait for the recipes you open. Pictures are illustrated tiles, not photos.

Treat the starter week as a first draft: unrelated dinners picked without knowing what your household likes. I ran it on a fresh account and shopped the result in what a meal plan generator gets right and wrong, which also has the five checks I run on any generated week before shopping. The generator gets better as soon as it has your own meals to work with, so the quickest route is to save the dinners you already cook. Planning without recipes explains why that list matters more than any recipe.

What it doesn't do

• It isn't free. Generating a week is part of Pro: $3.99 a month or $39.99 a year, one subscription for the whole household. The 14-day trial starts the first time you sign in with Apple, and you can't generate without signing in. Planning the week by hand, the shared library and household sharing stay free.
• Dinners only. One dinner per day. No breakfasts, lunches or snacks.
• No calorie or macro targets. It balances variety, not nutrition.
• It doesn't know your fridge or your budget. It can't see what's in the cupboard or what things cost, and it won't plan a leftovers night by itself. You can ask through Something else…, and it takes that as a request rather than a rule.
• It only knows the cook times you saved. A meal with no time recorded is treated as unknown, not as quick.
• A small library repeats. With fewer saved meals than days, some dinners appear twice.
• Allergy settings are a filter, not a guarantee. FamilyPlate checks each meal's name, ingredients and notes against the foods picked from the app's list of eight (nuts, gluten, dairy, shellfish, eggs, soy, pork and beef). A dish whose ingredient list leaves out the nuts will pass. Anything you type as a note, such as sesame, goes to the AI as a request and filters nothing. Check every dinner yourself.
• It can fall short. Now and then a run fills fewer days than asked. The app tells you how many it planned and you tap Generate again for the rest.
• It needs a connection, and there is a monthly cap. The planning runs on our servers, not on the phone. Each household has a monthly AI allowance, and if it runs out, AI features pause until the next month.

What the AI is sent: meal names, tags, cook times and serving counts, the household's diet settings and notes, day notes, the names of recently planned meals, and anything you type into Something else…. Never your name, email or account details. The privacy policy lists the services involved.

A chat that already knows your household

A general-purpose chatbot starts from zero every time: you retype the household and the busy nights, and it suggests dishes you've never cooked. Then someone copies the answer out of a chat window. FamilyPlate's Ask tab is a chat that starts from your own data: the meals you've saved and the weeks you've planned. Ask when you last had lasagne, what you haven't cooked in a while, or who planned last Tuesday.

Ask it to plan the week, rework a few days or note that you're out Wednesday, and it proposes the change on a card. It can also suggest a new meal or an edit to one you've saved. Nothing changes until you tap Apply, there's a short Undo afterwards, and it never deletes anything. The week it fills is the same shared plan your partner sees. Ask is part of Pro, and it sticks to food, meals, cooking, shopping and the app. To answer, it sends your message with the household's meals, plans and members' first names to the AI; the conversation stays on your phone.