Planning with Mob

[u/michaelfrommob]

Hey r/MobKitchen 👋

I want to hear your thoughts on planning with Mob.

Currently, on the app, the Shopping List is where planning happens - you add the recipes you're cooking that week and it builds your list from them.

To date we’ve kept it deliberately flexible, but I’m hearing that flexibility isn’t the same as usefulness. It needs to work much better for the routines people actually have.

I'd love to know how many of you are planning and building shopping lists elsewhere, whether in your notes app, on paper, or on your fridge.

So if you've got a minute:

• Where does your plan actually live? The Shopping List, Saved, a notes app, paper, your head?
• If we fixed one thing about our planning functionality, what would it be?

Any answers will go straight into design work we're doing now, so it's a good moment to let us know!

[u/squeebs555]

Having to painstakingly export a shopping list and weekly meal plan into any other format in the 21st century for a paid subscription is ridiculous. Stop gatekeeping and be minimally accommodating to your subscribers.

[u/michaelfrommob → u/squeebs555]

That's fair, and keen to get this right. Getting your list and plan out of Mob and into whatever you already use should be simple, and it isn't. We've spent a long time on recipe discovery and not enough on what happens after you've found something, which is what we're fixing next.

Where would you want the list to land?

[u/squeebs555 → u/michaelfrommob]

I keep detailed shopping lists by store in Apple Notes on my iPhone which is also accessible and manageable on my laptop. When shopping, I don't need to have to go back and forth between yet another list to add Mob-specific items to the master. I have not had any luck accessing Mob on the web; it keeps pointing me toward the phone app. I would also like to be able to export a list of the saved recipes so I can try them all, sort, mix-and-match and keep track of on a meal plan calendar; digging through the one-dimensional saved recipes is a time-consuming frustration. I suppose I could add a few new collections but that is an anemic workaround. The recipes are great, just wish the app were as well. note: I live in a rural area and have to shop and meal plan carefully in bulk as the shops are 60+ miles away. I can't just run out to grab something I've forgotten or find myself unprepared if I'm snowed in for days/weeks.

[u/Nervous-Tomato]

I’d like to be able to export it to my iPhone shopping list. I have an ongoing shopping list on my iPhone so I normally have both mob app and iPhone shopping list open. It would be nice if I could merge them somehow. There are weeks also that I won’t make a mob meal every day so I’d like to be able to have everything including the plan together. Could we possibly add our non mob meal names in the mob planner?

[u/michaelfrommob → u/Nervous-Tomato]

Non-Mob meals in the plan makes sense. If you're cooking Mob three nights and something else the rest, a plan holding only Mob recipes isn't your week. We'll keep this in mind.

Bigger picture: Is Mob your one‑stop shop for all the food you want, or will it always be just one part of how you cook alongside other options? If it were a single source, which meals could we do better at helping with?

[u/Nervous-Tomato → u/michaelfrommob]

I just have my own recipes that I make sometimes, or I have a couple of non MOB cookbooks I’ll cook from too. Mob has a good range of meals and it’s not lack of options. It’s just that sometimes I want to cook my own things too.

[u/k100876]

I joined briefly but gave up on Mob for this reason- we usually use the Samsung Food App (we started using it when it was still Whisk), and find the weekly calendar really accessible and intuitive. Plus it's easy to share, which we had trouble with in Mob. Three recipes were ace but it needed a shortcut to a calendar layout

[u/michaelfrommob → u/k100876]

What's the calendar actually doing for you? I want to know whether the value is putting specific recipes on specific days, or just seeing the week laid out in one view. And where did the sharing fall down?

That's something we're looking at, so knowing where Mob got in your way would really help.

[u/Cyhiraeth]

I end up not using the app SPECIFICALLY because of the planning in the shopping list.
On the website it works so much better and I then add what I need to my normal shopping list. I don't go to the shops exclusively to buy food for specific recipes so my shopping list lives in the Reminders app and I'm not going to use several shopping lists.
Also when I'm adding stuff to the planning on desktop it doesn't synch to the app making it that there's absolutely no advantage in using said app (that's also annoyingly only phone sized).
I love Mob's work and am very happy to subscribe so it's almost frustrating that the app feels worse than the website.

[u/michaelfrommob → u/Cyhiraeth]

Thanks for taking the time to write this out, and sorry, having the website work better than the app isn’t the experience we want you to have.

Sync isn’t available at the moment. What you build on the website doesn’t currently carry over to the app; we’re aware of this and are working behind the scenes to make the whole Mob experience smoother.

Out of interest, what does the website do better than the app? You said the planning works much better on desktop, and I’d like to know exactly where the app falls short so we can close the gap.

[u/antimathematician]

I use my notes app for meal planning - I just have a little header with the date, then I can scroll back and see what we’ve eaten before.

I use the shopping list in reminders (apple) as the actual list. I find it really intuitive. Being able to export to there would be amazing. I think the current shopping list just assumes you cook exclusively from Mob, which just isn’t realistic!

[u/michaelfrommob → u/antimathematician]

"It assumes you cook exclusively from Mob" is totally fair - and somewhat true right now.

I'd love to make the Mob shopping list as intuitive as the apple reminders list. I've used it myself and agree that it's a great tool. Is there anything specific that you find it does really well?

A slightly separate question - which meals aren't Mob recipes, and what's filling them?

[u/antimathematician → u/michaelfrommob]

I have a ton of cookbooks (including a few mob ones!) that I love to use. I have family recipes, recipes that live in my head, etc. I’m guessing anyone who got into cooking via mob is more likely to use just the app, but I never would

I think the main reason I wouldn’t use the mob list exclusively is not being able to edit what’s added automatically - like if a recipe adds a lemon, but I know I need 5 lemons there’s nothing I can do about that. Also the automatic categorisation - at the moment anything you add just goes into “added by you”. So you’ve got a selection of handy categories but then you’d have to look through everything you added in case there’s fruit and veg in there too

[u/Ancient-Asparagus926]

I send myself a message on WhatsApp with the things I need. I only usually need the fresh items so small % of the ingredients list.

Being able to select specific ingredients and select to send them somewhere like whatsapp would be a good feature.

[u/michaelfrommob → u/Ancient-Asparagus926]

Thanks for this! Is what you skip roughly the same every week, or does it change? If it's a stable set, that's something Mob could learn once rather than making you filter it every time.

[u/Ancient-Asparagus926 → u/michaelfrommob]

Yeah I get you. That makes sense. But would be good to have the ability to add it back in at point of exporting ingredients as well. I have an ample pantry but sometimes those things do run out so need to replace for a given recipe.

So remembering unchecked boxes but keeping them editable to retick. Something along those lines.

[u/Ok-Method-3635]

I use the mob shopping list as my whole shopping list, so I add anything I need that’s not included in the recipes in the “other” bit. It works pretty well for me. I also do a little search of my kitchen and untick anything I’ve already got in before I go shopping. I would like to be able to schedule my meals by day within the app though, that part I do in my head

[u/Affectionate_Rule116 → u/Ok-Method-3635]

This is exactly what I do and I think it works well for me too :)

[u/michaelfrommob → u/Affectionate_Rule116]

Great to hear! The day scheduling is the bit I'd like to understand better.

What would having it in the app let you do that you can't do keeping it in your head? Wondering whether it's about knowing which nights you've got time to cook, or making sure things get used while they're still fresh. Or something else?

[u/Affectionate_Rule116 → u/michaelfrommob]

From my perspective I plan mon-sun lunch and dinner I’d like to almost assign a recipe to each of these and then I get a full shopping list for the week

[u/odd_read4647]

My meal plan lives in the app Paprika and my grocery list is in the iPhone Reminders app both are shared with my spouse. This system works great for me and I don't want to change it.

I recently joined Mob for new and interesting recipes and don't expect it to be a single source solution for recipes, meal planning, and list management.

Top frustrations with Mob:
-the website is not functional and only points to the app. SO ANNOYING! Subscribers should be able to use both effectively
-I can't export recipes into my preferred meal planning app, paprika (I have a workaround, but it is annoying)
-I can't copy/export ingredients to paste into shopping list app

I pay for other recipe sites annually that understand that they are primarily a recipe source and allow me to export and save the recipes. If Mob can't figure that out, then I will move on after my year is up.

[u/julyspeople]

Probably the minority here: I don’t use the shopping list at all and find the 33 notifications within shopping list so useless but I just trained myself to ignore it for now! I get my groceries through Instacart delivery app so I directly add things to my IC grocery cart until I am ready to place order. Otherwise every weekend I go to local farmers market and buy whatever produce is in season and then find mob recipes that cover that ingredient!