Automated Grocery Lists for Meal Plans

Foodzilla generates grocery lists automatically from meal plans that are always up to date and configurable. This saves time and makes grocery list shopping much easier.

At Foodzilla, we focus on making the software automate as many tasks as possible for both the nutrition professionals and their clients. Our goal is to help make nutrition management and eating healthy a sustainable habit not a one-off experiment.

There are many obstacles in the way for both professionals who are managing other people's nutrition and the people themselves trying to achieve a sustainable healthy eating habit. Some of these problems include out-of-sync grocery lists, not being able to adjust servings after the plan is generated, not being able to swap meals/ingredients...etc.

That's why we created Smart Grocery Lists to solve all these problems and make the client experience simple and fun. Let's take a look at these problems in more details.

Problems with Grocery Lists

A nutrition coach provides meal plans and grocery lists to their clients as a PDF or email that can be printed. The next step for the client is to buy the ingredients for all the meals in a week/fortnight/month depending on their shopping pattern.

While this works for some scenarios, it falls through in the following situations and provides a bad experience for your clients:

What if the meal plan needs to be updated?

Meal plans are often updated to fit the client's needs. This requires re-generating the grocery list PDF or spreadsheet every single time the plan is updated.

What if the serving size doesn't match the amount the client wants to cook?

For example, the recipe was developed for two servings but this week there is only one person eating those meals and therefore the servings for all recipes/meals need to be changed.

What if the ingredients list was made for 1 week but the client wants to shop for 10 days? or 2 weeks?

The list in this case will need to be updated for each ingredient to match the new period. The client my have to manually calculate the total ingredients they need to buy for 10 days instead of 1 week.

What if some ingredients or foods are unavailable at the supermarket? which recipes will be affected?

Being able to remove the ingredients of some recipes from the grocery list is important but isn't possible when using a PDF or email to share these lists.

There are more problems but these are the main ones. Let's take a look at how Foodzilla solves them and makes the grocery shopping experience simpler.

Introducing Smart Grocery Lists

Foodzilla lets nutrition professionals create meal plans from recipes and assign them to clients. This process happens in real-time and any updates to the meal plans are reflected to the clients' mobile app instantly.

For each recipe in a meal plan, all the ingredients are grouped and formatted properly to be read by the client.

A grocery list is the collection of all the grouped ingredients summed up correctly for a period of time. This period is configurable and depends on the coach having a meal plan assigned to their client.

Why Are Smart Grocery Lists Better?

1. 1. Configurable date ranges: the client can choose any date range using our handy calendar and the ingredients will be generated automatically
2. 2. Configurable serving sizes per meal. For example, some meals are developed for say 4 people but the client actually only wants to shop for 1 person. In this case, the serving size can be set to 1 and that will update all the ingredient amounts accordingly
3. 3. Configurable meals in the List. Clients are able to see and change the meals they've got in any time period (next week, next 10 days...). When removing a meal, the ingredients will be recalculated automatically.
4. 4. Check/uncheck ingredients from the list (just tap on an ingredient to cross it off the list)
5. 5. Synced grocery lists. Clients always have the latest version of a meal plan and therefore grocery list are always up-to-date.

What about clients who don't use a mobile app? who still prefer a PDF?

Foodzilla also generates grocery lists automatically from meal plans when exported as a PDF for this exact case.

Grocery lists in a PDF can handle up to 500 ingredients in a meal plan spanning multiple pages and are also grouped appropriately to make it easier to shop for.

Conclusion

Foodzilla is the best automatic grocery list generator for meal plans (we offer a 10-day free trial). Grocery lists are generated in PDFs as well as in the mobile app (recommended method). Grocery lists in the mobile app are configurable and provide a superb experience for your clients.

If you're interested, this feature is available to customers on any paid plan and is available in the Foodzilla mobile app from version 7.8.0.

If you're new and would like to try out Foodzilla, feel free to signup today and get 10 days free trial. Subscribe to our newsletter to stay up to date with our development and learn more about Foodzilla.

Thanks for reading and if you have any questions, just click on the green chat-bubble in the bottom right of this page and the team will help you out.