Ask HN: Meal Planning App?

what is "chicken crust pizza"?

I'm a powerlifter, so I create a "macros outline" - x oz of rice, y oz of chicken breast, z grams of fiber to hit my nutrition and then fill it in with mood/cuisine.

There's a reason why there isn't a successful app out there, since this is 1) highly personalized and 2) very tedious (manually inputting ingredients, etc).

You beat me to it.

My son is a picky eater and his younger brother, though he eats everything, will follow his lead during dinners. Rather than continue the constant battle of wills to get my oldest to eat what we cook, I built a family meal planner. It allows me to add recipes, photos, type of cuisine (italian, indian, etc), and allows each family member to score the meal from 1-10.

Each meal is then automatically kept in rotation or dropped based on the score (i can keep ones my wife and I especially like even if the kids don't). Each family member can choose one meal for the following week, or I can generate a random list for existing meals. I can search by cuisine, ingredients, score, and a few other bits of data.

The app also will print out a weekly shopping list of ingredients based on meals selected, AND will take into account what ingredients I have on hand. However, although the app does provide an accurate list of ingredients, it hinges on me updating the ingredients I have in my pantry and I don't typically do this as it is manual and too time consuming - It was neat to do an initial inventory of ingredients when I built the app, and the app does subtract ingredients out when used in meals for the week, but i no longer update the ingredients when I purchase from store each week.

So if you know how to code, you code probably just roll your own as I did. Then it will have all the features YOU want. But as others have said here, there probably will be a solution out there that will meet your needs.

So, I did this personal project a couple of years ago where I downloaded a big recipe database and then did a bunch of parsing / cleaning code to reduce each recipe down into a list of ingredients... Then I did an analysis of the ingredients to determine which were the most effective ingredients (frequently used in recipes) as it occurred to me that that this could be used to create a shopping list that enabled the most home cooking. The resulting list was ingredient list was fascinating... Salt & Oil were right at the top. Anyway, you might want to steer peoples shopping in the direction that enables the most meals for them.