The Plan to Eat Blog

Monthly Meal Planning

Today we launched one of the most requested features for Plan to Eat. You can now plan your meals using a Monthly Meal Planner.

New Monthly Meal Planner

As you can see above, there is a new "Meal Planner" page and your recipes are listed on the left side and the meal planner is on the right. To add recipes, drag them to any day on the planner. To add other items not in your Recipe Book just click on any calendar day to view that day's detail. Once added, you can rearrange the recipes and other items (in blue) to any day or order in the day.

New Weekly Meal Planner

We also changed the way the weekly meal planner works. We have removed the "Add Recipes" buttons and the "Add other items..." fields to save valuable space. Now when you want to add recipes to the weekly meal planner, just drag them from your recipe book the planner. And if you want to add other items not in your recipe book, click on any day of the planner to bring up the detail for that day and input the other items (see picture above). It works like the monthly meal planner and we think it works better.

So head over to www.plantoeat.com to login (or signup for a free 30-day trial) and try it out. We hope you like the changes and we welcome your feedback on the new monthly meal planner and the changes to the weekly meal planner.

So what's next?

In the next week or so we will add the ability to filter your recipes on the meal planning page by keywords and tags. We'll also distinguish the calendar days by Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner and allow you to add events for the day and order them just like the recipes. We also want to integrate with other calendar software so you can see your events on Plan to Eat, and see your recipes on your favorite calendar software.

Meal Planning Should Be Easier

That's what my wife thought a few years ago, and that's why I started working on a meal planning website called Plan to Eat that would help our family decide what to eat when, and then create a categorized shopping list from our meal plan. It was a simple idea, but at the time I couldn't find anything online that did what we wanted. A lot has happened since I started working on Plan to Eat, and over the past year it has grown from a simple meal planning tool for our family and few friends, to a full featured meal planning, recipe sharing website with hundreds of people using it each week.

We have added many new features since our official launch only three months ago on June 1st. Some of them obvious and some not at all.

In June we added user profile settings with pictures and the ability to see your friends information. We also added the ability to easily update serving sizes for your recipes on the meal plan.

Then in early July our local paper, The Coloradoan, wrote an article about Plan to Eat. Then a few weeks after that I was finally able to redesign the site too look at little more modern and hopefully more enjoyable to use. Then we added the ability to print your meal plan for the fridge, and export it as a .csv file for Excel. 

In August we launched a referral program that allows paying subscribers to earn commission of $1 for every $4.95 monthly subscription and $6 for every $39 monthly subscription. You can easily track your referrals and use a special link to advertise on blogs/websites and emails. We also added bulk ingredient input when creating new recipes. We have already heard from a few of you that this makes it much easier to add recipes from sites we can't import from or from your own documents. Then we added a simple iPhone version of the site that allows you to view your shopping list and recipe book while at the grocery store.

This month we added the ability to order/sort your planned recipes on each day of your weekly planner. Just drag the recipes around like you normally would. We also moved some things around. Now you can easily update the date range your recipes and ingredients are pulled from your weekly planner, at the top of the shopping list page. And you can now Save/Load meal plans, update serving sizes and set options like start day and Time Zone, all from the Weekly Planner.

We have a lot of new ideas as well, and in my free time (which is currently not much, with 3 little ones and a full time job), I will continue to work hard to add things like a full monthly planner (with a place for daily events and separation of Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner), shopping list categorization by shopping store, and maybe even a real iPhone app that doesn't require internet to access your recipes and shopping lists.

Plan to Eat was created, and is supported by a me, a Dad trying to help his family and yours eat healthy meals at home and save money in the process.We sincerely appreciate all of you that have (or are planning to) subscribe to Plan to Eat. Without your subscriptions we would not be able to pay for our web hosting and other expenses. We hope to continually improve the site and add value to your investment. Thank you so much for your support.

If you have never used Plan to Eat before, visit www.plantoeat.com to sign up for a free 30-day trial.