What would make Mealime better for you? 🚀

[jeff]

Thanks @Josh! It’s awesome to that Mealime has been working well for you so far

The only suggestion I have as far as making the app better for me personally, would have to be an overall meal planning feature. Such as being able to input what I had for breakfast, lunch, dinner that day and getting an overall calorie consumption as well as a breakdown for nutrition. Pretty much something like MyFitness Pal. Something that would probably be even better than adding a tracking feature like mentioned above would be integration with the MyFitness app itself.

That would be awesome if Mealime could do this, eh? It’s something we’ve toyed with, and we’re still considering all the possible ways we could solve this problem. We could build a dashboard of some sort with stats, or integrate with MFP or Apple Health, for example. The trick is keeping the app simple, which is surprisingly tough to do as more features are added! We’ll think more on this though. Thanks again Josh

[jeff]

I might be strange, but on average I cook for myself 4 nights a week, for myself and one other person 2 nights a week, and for a group of 4-5 1 night a week, and I try to shop once a week but at most 2 times a week because I really just don’t have the time to go more often. This can vary week to week though. Usually, I set it for the 2-person plan for 5 or 6 nights, then I come up with my own plan for when I am feeding more people.

This is pretty interesting, Sophie; thanks so much for sharing. It seems to me that you sound like a bit of an outlier, but then again I wonder if more people have cooking schedules similar to yours? I’ll have to investigate this.

Also, one thing that would be nice is if the ingredients needed were slightly more seasonal based.

Seasonality is definitely something we’re planning to build into the meal plan builder logic in the future. I think this would help a lot with ease of grocery shopping, keeping costs down, and having fresher food.

I know it’s a tall order so I hope you didn’t take it as a critique!

Please, be blunt! We don’t take offence. Really, the only way to reliably make Mealime better is to hear as honest feedback from our users as possible. So don’t hold back! Thanks Sophie.

[jeff]

Another thought, would be to be able to see the nutritional info for each part of food that I’m cooking.

This is a great idea! Design implementation might be tricky, but I can definitely see the value in this type of feature. Thanks!

[jeff]

I would love a lower calorie option

Thanks Linda! Calorie / macronutrient customization is something we’re thinking deeply about for the future. I think this could be a huge value add to the app - thanks for bringing this top of mind.

[jcregan]

Agreed! If there was a list of things to prep for the week, such as taking an hour on Sunday to prep for the week, would be very helpful!

[jcregan]

Also, Through this week, as I noticed I was out of things, I added them to the grocery list but when I chose my new menu, all those items went away!!! Ahhhhh! and I can’t find a way to recover them… or have them transferred to the new grocery list… hopefully, I can remember them all…

[Deirdre]

I This is AMAZING!! I can not WAIT to try it!

[mitch]

Yuck! That sounds really frustrating @jcregan! This seems like a really important problem to solve, to me. You should be able to add items to your grocery list as you think of them throughout the and have them appear on your next week’s list.

Maybe when you’ve completed your grocery list for the previous week, we should have a button that says “Start your next week’s grocery list”, or something. You can press that and then start adding items which will automatically be added to your grocery list when you create your next meal plan.

Thanks so much for bringing this up. I bet it is something that other users have gotten frustrated with!

[KateGRD]

Hi there. I’ve attempted to read through what suggestions have already been given as to not repeat, however I’ve seen it come up over and over again. The two things that I would like to see you to make me a lime better are: 1. nutritional information and 2. A way to filter further than only choosing 1 eating preference…I’ll explain.

1. I am a dietitian, I practice in cardiac rehabilitation and have never found an application as easy as this, to use for myself even, to make healthy eating easy. I have recommended this app to countless other dietitians and patients that I see because I am so impressed with what you have made. Here’s where the problem lies. I only feel comfortable recommending this app to patients who have a moderate level of food and cooking knowledge because there are no calories, sodium, carbohydrates, or fat information for lower health educated individuals to assess that the recipe is OK for them to use.
   This is where my second point comes in. Even if you didn’t want to divulge all of the nutrition information you could provide filters that could disseminate between recipes that are higher or lower in sodium ( or other various nutrients, such as you do with “low carb”) as we give our patients actual number goals for nutrients.

With that said…I cannot rave enough about a free app that has saved me $, made my life easier and, shh, has lost 3# for me

Thanks,
Kate G

[jeff]

There’s nothing wrong with a 3# weight loss! Great job @KateGRD, I’m glad Mealime has been working well for you so far

I only feel comfortable recommending this app to patients who have a moderate level of food and cooking knowledge because there are no calories, sodium, carbohydrates, or fat information for lower health educated individuals to assess that the recipe is OK for them to use.

I appreciate your feedback, Kate. That makes sense. We do have full nutritional information available, but it’s currently only shown to Pro subscribers. It’s tough to strike a balance between making a simple app that most people can follow without making it too simple by withholding too many features or information. Nutritional info fell on the “too-much-info” side of the fence for us, but I can see how it is required for some people.

Have you found that some of your patients and colleagues upgrade to Pro in order to access nutritional information, or has it not come up?

you could provide filters that could disseminate between recipes that are higher or lower in sodium ( or other various nutrients, such as you do with “low carb”) as we give our patients actual number goals for nutrients.

This would be awesome! We are currently considering how to make filters / this type of granular meal planning available for a future release. I agree that it would be a big value add to the app. It’s a big’ish project, but I’m sure we’ll post updates in the community here to keep everyone informed of our progress

Thanks again for your feedback!

[mealimemileaem]

I thought a nice addition would be to provide a sustainable seafood meal plan option. In “settings” there would be a check mark that would look something like…

☐ Only include seafood recipes not on the “avoid” list of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch List

or

☐ Only include seafood recipes that are on the “Best Choices” or “Good Alternative” lists of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch List

[jeff]

I thought a nice addition would be to provide a sustainable seafood meal plan option

That’s a cool idea! Thanks for sharing.

[Cbabcock110]

Maybe there can be meal prep preference options: Make ahead/meal prep, slow cooker, etc.

[Cbabcock110]

I really wish we could add our favorites to meal plans without upgrading. At the risk of sounding cheap, that is the only feature missing for me in the free version and don’t think it’s worth paying the fee for the upgraded version just for that one feature.

Also, I wonder if there is a way to suggest what meals to swipe for instead of just being at the mercy of the app. For instance, if I have a recipe with asparagus and another recipe with chicken, maybe I want to look for a third recipe that used both of those ingredients to reduce waste and make shopping even easier.

But I do truly love the app! And we have LOVED all but one of the meals we’ve made so far!

And now - 5 minutes later, I see that many of these features are in the beta version! so excited to try it!!

[Okn0tok]

Please Fix it! It is hard to use when it’s chopping all the words off in menus and on buttons. 6.0 LG G4. I would pay for it if this is fixed, as it is I won’t. Uploading…

[jeff]

Thanks so much for your feedback re: favorites! It’s always good to know which Pro features are most compelling. I agree that Pro is probably not worth it if favorites is the only feature you’re looking for. We’re always thinking about how to improve both the free and Pro versions of the app, and we’ll certainly take your feedback into account

And now - 5 minutes later, I see that many of these features are in the beta version! so excited to try it!!

Awesome! Hope you like it!

[Squanchy]

Hello! I second the crock pot option. I’m currently paying for another service that has crock pot options but am not very happy with other features with that service and am looking to jump ship.

[jeff]

It is hard to use when it’s chopping all the words off in menus and on buttons. 6.0 LG G4

Thanks for letting us know! We’ve dug in and this is likely a text-style issue as others have reproduced the problem on different LG devices.

I would recommend that you go to your phone’s settings and change the font to something more standard (e.g., Roboto is the standard Android font) to see if it makes a difference. Apologies for this!

[Susan]

For instance, today I wanted to do the pork chops with peach salsa (it sounds so good) but no chance of finding peaches in my local grocery store, and I’m even spoiled being from the Bay Area.

Hi, Sophie! I’m from the Bay Area too. Just wanted to share a tip with you. I happened to have some frozen peaches for my smoothies. I guesstimated that a peach would be about 6-8 slices depending on the size of each slice. It worked great and didn’t leave the salsa watery or anything. This recipe was my first Mealime dinner and it was so good. I hope you get to try it soon.

-Susan

[Slaters]

It would be nice to have a couple of different menu options when adding items to the grocery cart manually. Currently you have to add the item, save it, then go back in to edit it to adjust quantity and place it in the correct category.