Review: Meal Planning with the Food Planner App
What It Does
This app has a menu planner calendar, a recipes section where you can upload your favorite recipes from the web or add your own, create a grocery list based on your recipes, save your menus, keep a record of your pantry inventory, or buy their meal plans ranging from “Health: Clean Plate” to “Vegan for Two.”
My Experience
I had been looking for a way to be more organized about meal planning and ultimately by planning more also saving more on grocery expenses.
The idea of having the meal-planning calendar, recipes, pantry inventory, and grocery list in one place is a good one. But, navigating takes some getting used to. I found going through the recipe-hunting process online and then uploading each recipe link to the Recipes section on the app was a bit laborious.
Usually, I have a few favorite websites that I go to The Yellow Table, The Food Network, and Giada de Laurentiis, and I probably spend an hour each weekend finding two new dinner recipes to try each week. On the other five days, I make very easy meals without recipes (spaghetti with meat sauce, hamburgers with sweet potatoes, fish baked in the oven with steamed vegetables, pork chops with homemade applesauce). While this app inspired and challenged me to find a planned meal for every lunch and dinner, it was time-consuming to explore recipes on my laptop, and then go to my phone and find them again just to organize them in one place. The app required a lot of work for the sake of organization.
Grocery List Feature
When I saw the grocery list feature, I was so excited because you can label your grocery list with a store name. Perhaps my expectations were too high, but I thought the grocery list had pricing ability, that it would automatically upload prices from that grocery store. It doesn’t do that--you have to key in the prices of each item. Or, there is a bar code feature on the Food Planner app that you could use when you go to the store and it will scan your prices as you shop. For me, scanning items at the store is too much work.
If I’m going to try to use my grocery list to budget, I want to be able to do that before I go to the store. So, my best bet would be to order groceries from the Instacart website on my laptop with Food Planner app grocery list from my phone. As you can see, this juggling between a website and an app is not an exact science. I’m also not convinced yet that Instacart saves me money.
Pros of Food Planner
I will use the app for storing recipes in one place, and using the menu planner and grocery list.
Cons of Food Planner
The grocery app could be easier to use. The Aisle feature was difficult to figure out how to use.
Meal planning using the app is very time consuming—really requires meal planning to be a Saturday project.
The old way of doing things, scribbling a grocery list from the ingredient list on a piece of paper in an organized way based on sections of the grocery store is the way I think, but I couldn’t do that easily with Food Planner.
