Life Is Busy. You Need Yummly's New Meal Planner
With a few quick taps, you can organize and schedule recipes into a personal Meal Plan, create a Shopping List, and even order groceries. You got this!
Yummly Meal Planner with Creamy Tuscan Chicken and Quick and Creamy Tomato Soup. Photos by Ashley Strickland Freeman and Olga Ivanova. Art direction by Daniel Führer.
Can we just say, life goes so much more smoothly with a plan? Specifically, a meal plan. What with the work day, the school day, and soccer practice/salsa dancing/JavaScript class and what-have-you at night, life is busy. Who wants to scrounge in the pantry and freezer at 6 p.m. with a hungry family at your heels? Not me. That’s why I’m so excited to share the new Yummly® Meal Planner with you. With the ability to assign recipes to a day or week, simplify shopping, and even set calendar reminders, it’s a game changer — and so easy to use. I think I’ll get my act together (finally, phew!) and make a plan. Care to join me?
Note: The Yummly Meal Planner is available to paid subscribers. See Yummly Subscription Terms for details.
Jump ahead to:
Why the Yummly Meal Planner >>
Schedule recipes and set a meal time >>
Why the Yummly Meal Planner
I’m the main cook for my family, and while it’s pretty impressive the way I can conjure up a tasty meal from a box of pasta, a bag of baby spinach, and some rotisserie chicken, I could use some inspiration. Yummly offers nearly 2 million recipes, and they’re all available to slot into Meal Plans.
The thing is, I don’t actually want to sift through millions of recipes. I want to see the ones my family will like — and with Yummly’s built-in filters and recommendations, that’s what I get. (More on that below.) Oh, and hey, throw in a Shopping List I can create and update with a few taps? Yes, please — again, more details below.
Launch the Meal Planner
You can access the Yummly Meal Planner on your phone, tablet, or computer, and it syncs across devices. Let’s go to the Yummly app on your phone, which you can download here. To launch the Meal Planner, tap on the calendar icon in the bottom navigation bar.
Load up some recipes
That planner is looking empty! Within the Meal Planner, you can easily add recipes from either the Today or This Week tabs. Here’s how.
1. Browse recipes
After selecting the Add Recipe button, tap on Browse Recipes to check out some recommendations — they’re based on the dietary preferences you’ve set up and on the recipes you save. The more you interact with the app, the smarter it gets! (To set up your preferences in the Yummly app, just go to the person icon in the bottom navigation bar. In the next screen, tap the gear button at the top right and choose Dietary Preferences to fill out what foods you like or want to avoid.)
Creamy Tuscan Chicken sure looks good. When you see a recipe you’d like to try, tap on the +/- button, then Done, to add it to your Meal Plan.
2. Head to your saved recipes
The other way to add a recipe is Add Saved Recipe. Tap that, and you’ll be able to select recipes from collections you’ve created. One collection I’ve created for myself is Weeknight Dinners, including these recipes:
Yummly also creates a collection for you of all your Scheduled and Made recipes. It’s easy to put these on repeat.
3. Go to the This week tab
You can also add recipes within the Meal Planner in the This week tab. From there, tap the +/- button next to any given day. Then, add a recipe using the same options as you did to Browse Recipes or Add Saved Recipe. (We’ll get to the scheduling part in a moment!)
4. Add recipes from outside of the Meal Planner
Wherever you are on the Yummly app, whether in your Home feed, Search, or Collections, you can add a recipe to a Meal Plan by tapping on the +/- button on a recipe card and selecting Add to Meal Plan from the menu that opens up.
Schedule recipes and set a meal time
Within the Meal Planner, every time you tap to save a recipe, you can also schedule it for a date — today, this week, or a future week. Any recipes you add from elsewhere in the app will land in your Unscheduled tab, just waiting for you to commit! Taking things one step further, you can set a specific meal time and add it to your phone's native calendar so you get a helpful nudge when it's time to start your prep.
Let’s see how setting a time comes together for Creamy Tuscan Chicken. To bring up the recipe, tap the arrow next to a day. From there, just tap the three dots to set your time.
Shop or order groceries
Going for gold, for an upcoming week you’ve committed to Chinese-Style Peanut Noodles with Cucumber and Quick and Creamy Tomato Soup in addition to the chicken recipe. Whoo-hoo! Now you’re ready for groceries, and Yummly can help make generating a Shopping List easy.
1. Add everything to your Shopping List
Maybe the cupboards are bare, and you need every ingredient. Pull up the week in the Meal Planner calendar, tap the three dots at the top, and then, Add All To Shopping List. To see your list, go to the checklist icon in the bottom navigation bar.
2. Add ingredients from a single recipe
If you need ingredients only from one recipe, tap the three dots next to it, and then Add to Shopping List.
3. Order groceries for delivery
No time to go to the store? From within Shopping List, tap Buy Now* to order groceries for delivery.
*Grocery ordering service available in select U.S. locations.
4. Edit or share your list
Maybe you forgot an item, or would like to send the list to your partner for shopping? No problem. It's easy to edit your Shopping List. To throw in additional items like tofu and milk, tap Add to Shopping List at the top of the screen.
Need to share your list with your partner? To text or email it, tap on the three dots in the top right corner and tap Share.
Get cooking
I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling pretty darned calm with my new Meal Plan — at least the start of one — in place. Which brings up one more great thing about the Yummly Meal Planner: I don’t have to totally get my act together. Sure, I could get carried away and plan several weeks’ worth of meals. For now, I’ve got a few days lined up, including an inspired chicken dinner. I count that as a win.
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Yummly is the ultimate app to simplify homemade cooking, with personalized recipe inspiration, organization, planning, and tools all in one place. Learn more in these next articles.