Meal Prep Mate

Why I built this?

Picture this: It's been another long day at work. As you race home through traffic, you begin to think, “What the heck I’m I going to eat for dinner?”. Thankfully, you remember that ambitious recipe you bookmarked over the weekend. You know, the one where you convinced yourself you'd have the energy to julienne three different vegetables and marinate meat for an hour (which, by the way, is still a frozen brick in your freezer). Suddenly all those fast food places along your route look very tempting.

However, you stay strong and drag your sorry self home for some desperate fridge-rummaging, hoping dinner will magically materialize. Eventually though, reality comes crashing down, and you finally give in to the hot n’ ready Little Caesar’s pizza or that ol’ trusty frozen lasagna from Costco. May your aspirations of “eating healthier” or “cooking at home” rest in peace.

Ring any bells? Yeah, I thought so. 😅

Don't get me wrong – I love cooking. But sometimes the whole meal planning process can feel like a logistical headache. You know weekly ritual of rounding up some healthy recipes that don't make you think "ugh, this again?", braving the grocery store battlefield, and somehow managing to cook everything before the vegetables turn into a science experiment in the back of your fridge. Add in a busy life, and it sometimes feels like you need a personal chef just to feed yourself properly!

Turns out you can, in fact, install a personal robotic chef in your kitchen to cook your food (check it out on Shark Tank). While this is certainly an effective—albeit expensive—solution, countless other solutions exist for eating better, including meal prep subscription services, calories counters, step-by-step meal plans and cookbooks and diets, and so on. Although many of these existing solutions would undoubtedly solve my problems, they never really solved my root problem.

I don’t want to pay for another subscription service for food I’m not sure I’ll like. I don’t want to be restricted to a rigid dieting plan. And I certainly don’t want to get bogged down scanning and weighing ingredients for counting calories. I just want someone to look at the recipes I already have and I know that I like, and then tell me what to make, when to make it , and how many portions to divvy out for a healthy serving size.

Basically, I want a sort of meal planning project manager scheduler thing. Something that I can use to easily plan out meal plans that fit my nutritional requirements. But I also want the plan to be efficient. For instance, the plan should minimize food waste by planning recipes together that share ingredients or warn me about fresh ingredients that will soon go bad. It should also help with scheduling and grocery shopping. What if I swap or reschedule a recipe for another day than originally planned? Will the ingredients still be fresh. Or what ingredients should I buy at the store? Should I just buy shelf stable ingredients now and wait to buy fresh ingredients later?

Design

Paper

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Features

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Solution

A meal planning app to create optimized meal plans without all the friction and headache.

Web extension that allows you to save recipe bookmarks. Sends to app and can analyze them.

1import { createClient } from "@sanity/client";
2import imageUrlBuilder from "@sanity/image-url";
3export const client = createClient({
4  projectId: "izdi8n8t",
5  dataset: "production",
6  useCdn: false, // set to `false` to bypass the edge cache
7  apiVersion: "2024-03-26", // use current date (YYYY-MM-DD) to target the latest API version
8  // token: process.env.SANITY_SECRET_TOKEN // Only if you want to update content with the client
9  perspective: "published",
10});