Why I Stopped Building My Own Meal Planner — and Chose Mealie Instead
I learned to cook as a kid, standing next to my mum, stirring pots and pretending I knew what I was doing. Then I went corporate. Canteen food, takeout, and the occasional sad salad became my diet. Cooking? That was something other people did.
Then COVID-19 hit. Suddenly, my kitchen wasn’t just a place to store beer and frozen pizza, and sometimes making way to much chilli. It was ground zero for survival. I relearned how to cook, not out of passion, but out of necessity. I even tried building my own meal planning tool (RIP, ThymeSave), but eventually, I gave up and accepted the chaos.
But chaos isn’t a meal plan. I needed a system that let me cook without the hassle, or the food waste. I wanted something that would make my kitchen act like a well-oiled machine.
Let's take a step back, what I wanted to have
After years of failed apps and half-baked systems, I knew exactly what I needed:
- Grocery lists that respect my pantry. If I already have three jars of strained tomatoes, I don’t need the app telling me to buy more.
- Smart shopping lists: I would rather not add water or salt to my shopping list by default when I usually have this at home.
- A UI that doesn’t require a PhD. If I require a tutorial to add a recipe, it’s already failed.
- Intelligent ingredient parsing: Joining ingredients together, in one unified shopping list item, instead of one per recipe.
- Meal planning with rules. I want a meal plan that feels like it actually helps me and not complicates my life.
- Self-hosted. If I’m trusting an app with my recipes, I want to control where they live.
Meal planning and recipe management isn’t about becoming a chef, it’s about reclaiming time, reducing waste, and avoiding the 22:00 panic of “What the hell do I eat tomorrow?” A recipe manager and meal planner doesn’t just organize recipes; it organizes your life. And in a world where takeout is easier than thinking, that’s revolutionary.
The problem
None of the tools I tried fulfilled my needs. Most were either ugly as hell, overcomplicated, or treated meal planning like a corporate compliance checklist.
I didn’t have a meal planner. I had:
- A fridge full of ingredients I’d forget about.
- A takeout habit that cost me 200€/month.
- A mental load that made “what’s for lunch?” the most stressful question of the day. I required something that didn’t just improve my system, I needed something that created one.
Mealie: Finally, Something That Just Works
Shoutout to Stephan
One day, I was ranting in our internal Slack channel at DeepL for food and drinks about how every meal planner app sucked. Stephan casually dropped something like “Self-hosted, no bullshit, just works. Try Mealie.” I tried their demo and was sold.
First impressions
- Docker Compose Magic: Pull the image, tweak the
docker-compose.yml, anddocker-compose up -d. Boom. Running. - Recipe Import: Easy JSON/URL imports. No manual entry, no “please reformat your entire recipe collection.” It just works.
- User Invites: Two clicks to add my partner. Adding some friends to a dedicated household. User management is a breeze.
- Category/Tags: Customizing categories was actually intuitive. No nested menus, no hidden options, just type (or click) and go.
- API Access: Getting used to the API for webhooks took 60 seconds. Most tools make you jump through hoops for this.
The Only “Hard” Part? Getting Single Sign with OIDC to work with Auth0. But even that was just following their docs and adding permissions for Mealie, and now I don’t have to manage another login. So, still a win.
A few months in: The Good, the Quirky, and the Webhook
The Good
- Recipe organization: Finally, a system that doesn’t make me want to scream. Categories, tags, and search that actually work.
- Meal planning: It works quite well, even though it feels a bit clumsy occasionally.
- Grocery lists that respect my pantry (and my intelligence). If I already have three jars of tomatoes, or basic staples like salt. I don’t need the app nagging me to buy more when I just need a few grams.
- Multi-user: My partner and I can plan meals easily and no more “what's for lunch tomorrow?” And I can even invite my friends in a dedicated household, and still share recipes.
- LLM-based ingredient parsing: Allows easily parsing units and ingredient names from whatever weird format I wrote them down or find them.
The Quirky
- Mobile UI: Functional, simple, not gorgeous. But it doesn’t crash, so I’ll take it.
- Recipe creation: Feels a bit clunky sometimes for parsing ingredients, besides that, it gets the job done
Getting my recipe data to my previous Chowdown solution
Before settling with Mealie, I only published my recipes using Chowdown. To make it possible to synchronize the recipe easily with it, I created the mealie-webhook-handler.
If you have a similar use-case where you want to sync recipes to another recipe system, feel free to check it out.
timo-reymann
Before vs. After Mealie
Mealie really has already paid off for me, to make the impact a bit more graspable:
| Before Mealie | After Mealie |
|---|---|
| 1 takeout meal/week | 2 takeout meal/month |
| 50€ per month wasted on groceries that went bad | almost no food waste |
| 20 minutes daily stressing what to cook | 0 minutes stressing—just cooking |
| Fridge full of sad ingredients | Fridge with only what I need |
The Verdict: Mealie vs. The World
Is it perfect? No.
Is it the best I’ve found? Hell yes.
If you want to cook but hate the admin work, if you’re tired of conversations “what’s for lunch,” or if you’ve ever stared into a fridge full of food and thought “I have nothing to eat”, Mealie’s for you.
Unless you are allergic to self-hosting or unwilling to spend 20 minutes setting up something that’ll save them 20 hours later, I can only recommend it.
Final Thought
Mealie won’t turn you into Gordon Ramsay. But it will stop you from eating the same for three days in a row, and even for someone who doesn’t always cook by the book, that’s a lot easier to plan. Less food waste, easier shopping, and one fewer thing to stress about? Yeah, I’ll take it.
