Planning the week’s menu

Build a weekly plan

Pick the days, meals per day, and who is eating — including guests. Then fill each slot from your recipe collection. Portions scale to the people in the plan, so shopping amounts come out right.

Menu settings opens from the gear next to Generate menu. Each meal has its own page for heartiness, focus, quick cooking and who eats it, Who's eating sets the people for the whole menu, and the rarer options, such as diet, cuisine and Extra exclusions, sit under Advanced.

The same meal every day

Give a meal a recipe it always gets, such as porridge every breakfast: in Menu settings, open the meal and choose the recipe under Always. When you generate the menu, that meal gets this recipe every day, and the choice applies to the whole group.

If the recipe clashes with an allergy the group menu avoids, or with the diet, Generate picks another recipe for that meal.

Where Generate takes recipes from

Recipe sources in Menu settings decides where Generate may take dishes from: Favorites, Often eaten, Our recipes, Verified or the Mealuna library. The choice applies to the whole group, and at least one source always stays on.

Within those sources, Generate puts your group's favourites first and tries not to repeat the dishes of the last few days. The Use up before it spoils card keeps to your sources and your diet too. A meal's Always recipe is used even when it comes from outside them.

Repeat, move or pick again

Tap a planned meal and choose Repeat or move… to put the same dish on other days at the same meal, or turn on Move to shift it to another day. If a day already has a meal there, Mealuna shows what it replaces before you confirm, and Undo takes the change back for a few seconds afterwards.

When you fill an empty meal, the picker shows up to 3 dishes that meal had recently at the top, under Recently here, yesterday's first.

Shop only for what’s missing

When the plan is ready, Mealuna compares the ingredients against your pantry and builds a shopping list of only the items you actually lack.

Today we cook

No plan? Add a one-off meal for today. Mealuna can also suggest a recipe based on what is about to spoil in your pantry, so good food gets used instead of wasted.

Marking a meal cooked updates your pantry; marking it eaten logs it to your food diary — no extra steps.

Cook once for several meals

Cooking a dish that is on the menu again later? When you mark it cooked or start cooking, Mealuna offers to cook it for those meals too: one switch per meal, all off until you turn them on. The amount adds up, and the pantry goes down once for all of them.

Only confirmed meals are offered, not drafts. A recipe you open from the menu shows the same switches under its title, and its amounts follow as you turn them on.