It was only a few months ago, in September 2025, that I discovered the BigOven app. With over 1 million recipes, the app quickly became my go-to destination for finding new dishes to cook. I could mention the Caprese Mac and Cheese or the Sesame Pork Tenderloin, but if I dwell on them for too long, then I’ll be in serious danger of salivating in front of other coffee shop frequenters.
BigOven is a fantastic app for inspiration and basic grocery list creation, but its meal planning and shopping tools pale in comparison to the MealBoard app that I’ve recently discovered. It’s also significantly more affordable, which is a big win in my books, especially considering the number of apps that I like to use.
MealBoard claims to be your all-in-one kitchen app where you can save recipes, plan meals, and create shopping lists. One user has described it as “Hands down the most useful app I have on my phone. I use it every week to meal plan and grocery shop. It is incredibly well-designed, and I would have paid 10x the price to use it.”
Homescreen heroes
This is part of a regular series of articles exploring the apps that we couldn’t live without. Read them all here.
I’ve only been using the app for a short while, but I can already see how beneficial it could be for my family and me. We love food and sit down together every night for family mealtime. We also do our best to eat a varied diet and try to plan accordingly, but we could always do with a little extra help, and I think I’ve found that with MealBoard.
It all begins with the recipes!
MealBoard only ships with seven recipes, which means the onus is on the user to add their own. Thankfully, this is super straightforward with two available options. The first is to add them manually by entering a range of information, including the name, description, ingredients, and, of course, the directions. This is ideal for those recipes that you know and love or that have been passed down from generation to generation.
The second option is to import from a webpage, which is by far the quickest and easiest. All you have to do is click ‘Import,’ find a recipe using the search functionality, and then click ‘Import Recipe.’ MealBoard extracts all the relevant information from the page and populates all the relevant new recipe fields. You are then free to make adjustments before saving it to your library.
Having figured out the above, I proceeded to add some popular meals that we love. That meant finding our favorite chicken fajitas recipe, the delicious spaghetti bolognese, and around a dozen other meals that we currently have in circulation. Adding all these took no more than ten minutes, and with it done, I was then ready to plan my meals.
Plan meals like a pro
MealBoard features a simple calendar interface for quickly adding meals that are already contained in your recipe library. All you have to do is select the date you want to add a meal, click ‘Add Meals,’ search for the desired recipe, and then add it. My only gripe with this part of the process is that you have to search for recipes rather than being presented with all your options in a list format.
After you’ve added a meal, you can then set whether it should be breakfast, lunch, dinner, or a snack. You can also add a specific meal note, such as “Bert isn’t home for dinner today” or “cook extra because the kids have friends over.”
And if you fancy moving meals around, then that’s as simple as dragging them around the calendar. This was my preferred option when I was meal planning for the coming week because it was significantly quicker than adding them from scratch again.
Now it’s time for the magic to begin. Populating your shopping list is as simple as heading to the ‘Shopping’ tab, setting the date range for syncing meals, entering the number of servings, and hitting ‘Sync.’ Boom, job done. You instantly get a full shopping list split into different categories such as canned, dairy, meat, and more. It’s then time to head to the shop.
You can thank MealBoard for the (hopefully) stress-free shopping experience that it enables, but the benefits don’t end there. By utilizing the pantry feature, you can keep track of items that you have in the house. And as you cook meals, you can easily adjust the items left in stock.
MealBoard has been a breath of fresh air, and I would recommend it to anyone. The free version is fairly feature-rich, but if you’d like to remove all limitations, then you’ll need to pay $12.99/£12.99 for MealBoard Premium. For the money, you’ll get an unlimited number of recipes, cloud backup, and syncing across multiple devices.
So, if you like the idea of simplifying everything to do with the meals you eat, why not download MealBoard on iOS.
(At the time of writing this, there is no Android version)
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paulo.n.hatton@gmail.com (Paul Hatton)
