Best Recipe App with a Meal Planner and Grocery List

A workflow from saved recipes to Meal Plan to shopping list, with the local-storage caveat and experimental Pantry note.

Arisa Shiraishi

Arisa Shiraishi

Solo builder of Souschef2 min read

The useful meal-planning app is the one that starts with recipes you will actually cook, then builds a grocery list without a second spreadsheet. Souschef can do that loop on the free plan, with two limits you should know up front.

Quick answer: Save recipes, open Meal Plan, add one or more recipes to each day, then add that day or the whole week to your shopping list. Meal Plan requires sign-in and lives on that phone. Pantry matching is optional and experimental.

The weeknight workflow

  1. Import or scan the recipes you want this week. Social, website, photo, and text imports all land in the same library.
  2. Open the Planner tab and tap Meal Plan, or tap Plan this recipe on a saved recipe.
  3. Each week runs Monday through Sunday. Tap a day and add saved recipes. You can add more than one recipe per day; there are no breakfast/lunch/dinner slots.
  4. When the plan looks right, choose Add this day or Add week.
  5. Review ingredients, adjust servings if needed, skip anything you already have, and add the rest. Matching Pantry staples can be excluded automatically.
  6. Shop from the aisle-sorted list, or share a live list.
  7. Cook from Cooking Mode when it is time to make the meal.

If the same recipe appears on several days, Souschef adds it to the shopping list only once.

You can only plan recipes that are already saved.

Important limits

Meal Plan is stored on the phone, not in the cloud. A new device or a reinstall will not restore it. A different account on the same phone keeps its own plan.

Meal Plan itself is not a shared calendar. To shop with someone else, share the shopping list after you add ingredients.

Pantry is experimental. It does not update itself. Treat it as a lightweight list of long-lasting staples, not a full inventory.

How this compares at a glance

ReciMe also advertises weekly meal plans and grocery lists. ReciMe’s public Plus split is covered in Souschef vs ReciMe. Paprika meal planning is part of its paid per-platform app; see Paprika alternative.

If you only needed a shopping list, the recipe to grocery list guide is the shorter path.

Plan a week and build the list

Save two dinners, put them on the plan, and send the week to a list before you go to the store. 🛒

Get Souschef for iPhone and iPad or download Souschef for Android.