Simplify Meal Planning with Plan to Eat
In this post: Learn how to simplify meal planning and grocery shopping using an app called Plan to Eat.
I love finding new apps and tools that make my life easier. With three hungry boys (and a husband) at home, I have to be on my A-game when it comes to meal planning and grocery shopping, or we just won’t have enough food.
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I have tried multiple meal planning and grocery list apps, including Amazon Alexa’s built in shopping list. The shopping list on Alexa made it easy to add things to my list, but it was too easy for my kids to add things. I kept finding random things on my list…like puppies and suckers. Also, it was just a shopping list, it didn’t help with the meal planning side of things.
Once I discovered Plan to Eat my world changed! I’m excited to share with you the features I love about this meal planning app, and hope it might save you some time and stress as well when it comes to meal planning.
Meal Planning Simplified
I’m not kidding when I say Plan to Eat changed my life. I can store my recipes in Plan to Eat, then add them to a calendar to plan my meals for the week, and finally it adds the ingredients from my recipes to my shopping list automatically. Not just any list, but an organized list by where I find the items in the grocery store. I love that it combines meal planning with my grocery list.
I have also taken it a step further, and after I have my shopping list, I just open another tab on my computer and do my online grocery shopping right away. I pick up my groceries at 8:00 am the next morning after dropping the kids off at school. The whole process from meal planning to grocery shopping takes me about a half hour on Sunday night. Then I have a kitchen full of groceries Monday morning. Stress free, and amazing!
Plan to Eat Features
I want to show you a few of the features that make Plan to Eat stand out compared to other meal planning/grocery list apps out there. You can access Plan to Eat on a computer or on their mobile app. The screenshots I am going to show are from the desktop version.
Recipes
The “Cook” screen is basically your cookbook. This is where all of your recipes live, organized by course of meal. You can also see your friend’s recipes to get new ideas. If you sign up with my link, I will automatically be your friend, and you can see my recipes.
From the “Cook” screen you can import new recipes. There are several ways to import recipes: 1) You can paste a URL from any website, 2) add your own recipes manually, or 3) use the Plan to Eat toolbar add-on. The toolbar add-on is my favorite way to add recipes. If I am looking at a recipe on the web, I can just click the button and it adds the recipe to my Plan to Eat account. So easy!
I imported a lot of recipes I had saved to Pinterest. I have seen two benefits to this, 1) Following my recipes from Plan to Eat is a lot easier, because they are more condensed than most blog post recipes, and I don’t have to scroll through a whole blog post to get to them. 2) I’m starting to find some of the recipes I originally pinned are from blogs that no longer exist. I’ve lost some of my favorite recipes to this problem. Once they are imported into Plan to Eat, I don’t need to worry about that.
I love that everything I cook/bake, is in one place that I can access from my phone or computer. If a friend asks me for a recipe, I have all of my recipes at my fingertips, and I can text her the recipe instantly.
Meal Planner
Once you have some recipes, you can start adding them to the planner. I don’t always plan out my breakfasts and lunches, because I eat leftovers a lot, but they give the option to plan all meals. You can also see you can add prep notes to the recipes that will automatically be added to the planner. I like to put in notes to remember to thaw meat the day before.
The recipes that get planned can also be imported into your Google Calendar or iCal, which is awesome if you like viewing your meal plan on your regular calendar.
Shopping List
After you have your meals planned, the “Shop” tab (your shopping list) will be populated with all of the ingredients you need. At this point, you can remove items that you might already have at home to clean up your list (or just leave them and skip them at the store).
If you adjusted the number of servings on your recipe when it was added to the planner, it will automatically adjust your shopping list as well! You can access this list on your phone, so you always have it with you at the store.
There is also a menu option for Staples. This is an easy way to add items to your list that you might buy regularly, but may not end up as ingredients in your recipe, such as bread and milk.
Bonus Meal Planning Tip
A trick I like to do is create a “recipe” for something like Taco Night. I don’t actually follow a recipe for tacos, but there are ingredients I need to buy to make tacos for my family. So I created a recipe called “Taco Night”, then added things to the list like tortillas, salsa, cheese etc. Then I can still plan tacos on my meal plan, and all of the ingredients get added to my shopping list in one step.
How much does Plan to Eat Cost?
Plan to Eat costs $49 a year, which comes out to just over $4/month. This is a price I am willing to add to my monthly grocery budget to make up for the time I save, as well as not buying extras that aren’t on my shopping list.
There are no ads on their site, and they default to NOT automatically renew your subscription. Both things I really appreciate. With that said, I have a feeling you might renew anyways (I’m on year 7 with of my subscription!)
I really think the free trial of Plan to Eat is worth it. If you decide to give it a try, I’d love to know what you think of it!
I’ve been using Plan To Eat since 2014. Yes, it saves money and it simplifies meal planning and shopping. But I sure wish they’d give the paying user more options. Your screen above showing “Taco Night” now has when you imported the recipe, the last time you used the recipe and something else where “directions” are. Why that is important information is beyond me. Also your screen also shows “PTE Recipes (12).” If I’m not interested in them, why can’t I delete that. The whole look used to be much cleaner. And if they just gave us more than a few options of setting up, what they call OUR recipe book, it would be the perfect app. Right now, it’s down to 3 1/2 stars.
Thanks for your feedback and interesting perspective. Those extra details have never bothered me, and are relatively small compared to other info on the screen (on my phone it’s at the very bottom, so I rarely see it). What added options would you like to see? How would you set up the recipe book differently? The only thing I’ve ever wished they added was Alexa compatibility. I’d love to be able to add something to my PTE shopping list from Alexa, and view my recipes on my Echo Show in the kitchen…but I gave up on that happening years ago.
I have a question I hope you can help with: I have a number of personal recipes in various formats: Word, PDF and even jpg documents. Is there a way to import those into the app, or must I type them all in individually? I’m trying to decide between this app and Paprika. Any comments on that? Thanks for your time.
Hi Karen! I don’t think you will be able to use the recipe clipper for those other formats, but you should be able to copy/paste parts of the recipe to make it quicker, especially with the bulk ingredients option. I have used this method, and it did go quicker than typing them all. There is also a new feature that let’s you scan photos of recipes with your phone. Here is some more info about the scanning: https://learn.plantoeat.com/help/app-import-recipes-from-photos and here is info about importing them manually: https://learn.plantoeat.com/help/how-do-i-add-recipes-using-the-app Hope this helps!
Plan to Eat simplifies meal planning so well! It’s a great tool for keeping everything organized and stress-free. I’m excited to try it out!