It was only some months in the past, in September 2025, that I found the BigOven app. With over 1 million recipes, the app shortly grew to become my go-to vacation spot for locating new dishes to cook dinner. I may point out the Caprese Mac and Cheese or the Sesame Pork Tenderloin, but when I dwell on them for too lengthy, then I’ll be in critical hazard of salivating in entrance of different espresso store frequenters.
BigOven is a improbable app for inspiration and primary grocery checklist creation, however its meal planning and buying instruments pale compared to the MealBoard app that I’ve just lately found. It’s additionally considerably extra inexpensive, which is an enormous win in my books, particularly contemplating the variety of apps that I like to make use of.
MealBoard claims to be your all-in-one kitchen app the place it can save you recipes, plan meals, and create buying lists. One consumer has described it as “Fingers down probably the most helpful app I’ve on my telephone. I exploit it each week to meal plan and grocery store. It’s extremely well-designed, and I might have paid 10x the value to make use of it.”
Homescreen heroes
That is a part of an everyday collection of articles exploring the apps that we could not dwell with out. Learn all of them right here.
I’ve solely been utilizing the app for a short time, however I can already see how useful it may very well be for my household and me. We love meals and sit down collectively each evening for household mealtime. We additionally do our greatest to eat a diverse food plan and attempt to plan accordingly, however we may all the time do with just a little additional assist, and I feel I’ve discovered that with MealBoard.
All of it begins with the recipes!
MealBoard solely ships with seven recipes, which implies the onus is on the consumer so as to add their very own. Fortunately, that is tremendous simple with two out there choices. The primary is so as to add them manually by getting into a spread of data, together with the identify, description, components, and, after all, the instructions. That is best for these recipes that you realize and love or which were handed down from era to era.
The second possibility is to import from a webpage, which is by far the quickest and best. All it’s important to do is click on ‘Import,’ discover a recipe utilizing the search performance, after which click on ‘Import Recipe.’ MealBoard extracts all of the related info from the web page and populates all of the related new recipe fields. You’re then free to make changes earlier than saving it to your library.
Having discovered the above, I proceeded so as to add some standard meals that we love. That meant discovering our favourite rooster fajitas recipe, the scrumptious spaghetti bolognese, and round a dozen different meals that we at present have in circulation. Including all these took not more than ten minutes, and with it completed, I used to be then able to plan my meals.
Plan meals like a professional
MealBoard contains a easy calendar interface for shortly including meals which can be already contained in your recipe library. All it’s important to do is choose the date you wish to add a meal, click on ‘Add Meals,’ seek for the specified recipe, after which add it. My solely gripe with this a part of the method is that it’s important to seek for recipes somewhat than being offered with all of your choices in an inventory format.
After you’ve added a meal, you possibly can then set whether or not it must be breakfast, lunch, dinner, or a snack. You can too add a particular meal word, resembling “Bert isn’t dwelling for dinner immediately” or “cook dinner additional as a result of the children have buddies over.”
And when you fancy shifting meals round, then that’s so simple as dragging them across the calendar. This was my most popular possibility once I was meal planning for the approaching week as a result of it was considerably faster than including them from scratch once more.
Now it’s time for the magic to start. Populating your buying checklist is so simple as heading to the ‘Procuring’ tab, setting the date vary for syncing meals, getting into the variety of servings, and hitting ‘Sync.’ Growth, job completed. You immediately get a full buying checklist cut up into totally different classes resembling canned, dairy, meat, and extra. It’s then time to move to the store.
You’ll be able to thank MealBoard for the (hopefully) stress-free buying expertise that it permits, however the advantages don’t finish there. By using the pantry function, you possibly can hold observe of things that you’ve in the home. And as you cook dinner meals, you possibly can simply regulate the objects left in inventory.
MealBoard has been a breath of recent air, and I might suggest it to anybody. The free model is pretty feature-rich, however when you’d prefer to take away all limitations, then you definately’ll have to pay $12.99/£12.99 for MealBoard Premium. For the cash, you’ll get a vast variety of recipes, cloud backup, and syncing throughout a number of gadgets.
So, when you like the concept of simplifying every little thing to do with the meals you eat, why not obtain MealBoard on iOS.
(On the time of scripting this, there is no such thing as a Android model)
Comply with TechRadar on Google Information and add us as a most popular supply to get our knowledgeable information, opinions, and opinion in your feeds. Be certain to click on the Comply with button!
And naturally you may as well observe TechRadar on TikTok for information, opinions, unboxings in video type, and get common updates from us on WhatsApp too.
