Our Meals: Family Meal Planner

Our Meals is a shared cookbook, meal planner, and grocery list for your whole household — live on every phone. Import recipes from any site, Instagram, TikTok, or a photo of a cookbook page.

Comment

Inspiration

My wife and I ran into this problem all the time: we'd save cooking videos and recipe links in various places, send them back and forth to each other, and copy and paste ingredients into our Notes apps for our weekly trip to the grocery store.

What it does

Our Meals is a shared cookbook, weekly meal plan, and grocery list that stays in sync across every phone in your household.

  • Import from anywhere - Share a video from Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, or Facebook, or paste a link from any recipe site, and it comes back as a structured recipe — ingredients, steps, times, nutrition. We don't just read the caption: we pull the voiceover and on-screen text too. You can also photograph a cookbook page or a handwritten recipe card.
  • Plan together with Easy Peasy Planner - Stop asking "what do you want for dinner?". Anyone in the household picks the nights to plan, and everyone gets the same deck of recipes from your own cookbook — favorites, ones you haven't made in a while, a few you've never tried. Swipe right or left whenever you have a minute. When a majority of the household says yes, it lands on the next open night. Everyone gets a notification when planning starts and when the week is set. You can still drag and drop recipes onto any day yourself.
  • One grocery list - Add ingredients onto a shared list, sorted by aisle. Whoever's at the store checks things off and everyone else sees it.
  • Cook it - A cooking mode with tappable ingredient amounts inside each step, hands-free big-text mode, serving scaling, and metric/US conversion.
  • Remember what you loved - Per-person favorites and a made-it counter, so next week's plan starts from what your household actually eats.

How we built it

  • iOS - Native SwiftUI
  • Backend - FastAPI, SQLAlchemy + Postgres.
  • Data + Auth - Supabase, Google OAuth, Sign in with Apple;
  • Import Pipeline - Runs on async background workers, so a 90-second video transcription so we can import recipes asynchronously.
  • CI/CD - GitHub Actions — pytest, db migrations, deployment

Challenges we ran into

  • Balancing Speed and Accuracy - More Short-form cooking videos than you think don't write measurements or steps down — they're spoken over a sizzling pan, or on screen for two frames. Reading just the caption is fast and confidently wrong, which is worse than returning nothing. We run every signal on every import — caption, voiceover, and on-screen text to ensure the quality of the recipes users save.
  • Recipe deduplication that still allows for customization - Recognizing when two imports are really the same recipe took a lot more than comparing links, and that was only half the problem. The other half was making sure none of it changed anything for the user: every household's copy stays fully editable, and fixing a step or renaming an ingredient only ever affects your own while still giving a speed boost to other users that import the same recipe.
  • Normalizing Data - Combining "2 tbsp olive oil" from one recipe with "1/4 cup olive oil" from another into a single grocery line means teaching the app which units can be added at all. We canonicalize every unit into a family — volume, weight, or count — so compatible ones merge and incompatible ones stay separate rather than silently producing nonsense. Then the answer has to be something a person would actually write on a list: 250 ml, not 236.588 ml.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • It's live with real users - Our Meals shipped to the App Store on August 8, 2026. As of the date this was posted we have 155 users, 6 of which are paid subscribers. We have Our biggest user has imported over 100 recipes!
  • **Recipe Deduplication — Recognizing when two imports are the same underlying recipe, so popular ones only get parsed once. Cuts import time and keeps our AI costs from scaling linearly with usage.
  • Household-scoped premium - One subscription covers everyone in a household.
  • Easy Peasy Planner - Turned "what's for dinner this week?" from "idk you choose" into a few minutes of swiping for each person.

What we learned

  • People forgive slow. They don't forgive wrong - Nobody has complained that an import took an extra twenty seconds. One wrong measurement and they stop trusting the whole cookbook. That tradeoff ended up deciding a lot of the decisions we made.
  • Building for your own household is a cheat code - My wife is the actual user, so every feature had to survive a real round of planning and grocery store runs. Ideas that sounded great on paper didn't work out.
  • Distribution is hard - Building the app turned out to be the easy part. Getting it in front of people is harder, and we're still figuring it out: posting on TikTok and Instagram, and running Meta ads to learn which message actually gets a household to download.

What's next for Our Meals

  • Grocery Store Integrations - Order groceries for pick up or delivery based on your in app grocery list
  • Creator Cookbooks - Partner with creators and chefs to share their digital cookbooks in app
  • Android

Built With

Share this project:

Updates

Submission history