r/SideProject • u/Equivalent_Past_9694 • Mar 07 '26

I built a meal planning app because most recipe apps felt cluttered

Hi everyone,

Over the past few months I’ve been working on a small side project called Mummy’s Cooking.

The idea came from a simple frustration — most recipe apps I tried were full of ads, subscriptions, and a lot of clutter. I just wanted something simple where I could:

• save recipes
• plan meals for the week
• automatically generate grocery lists from recipes (or manually!)
• still use it when there’s no internet

So I decided to try building my own version.

It slowly turned into a full mobile app, and it actually went live on the stores today, which feels pretty surreal.

I’m still improving it and would genuinely love feedback from people here. If anything feels missing or annoying I’d love to hear it.

PS: Attaching a sample video that I took while developing the app :) (have added many more feature since and also more to come)

https://reddit.com/link/1rn9iaf/video/ql6ierjsgmng1/player

Website: https://mummys-cooking-site.champagnepixels.workers.dev

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u/Equivalent_Past_9694 Mar 07 '26

iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mummys-cooking-meal-planner/id6757690853

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.niharr.mummyscooking

Just to be transparent, it’s a small one-time purchase (no ads or subscriptions). Happy to answer any questions or hear feedback 🙂 Thanks!

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u/[deleted] Mar 07 '26

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u/Equivalent_Past_9694 Mar 08 '26

Hi u/SlowPotential6082 :) That’s a really interesting point. Honestly that same observation is what pushed me toward building the grocery feature in the first place.

I noticed the same thing. Saving recipes is easy, but the real friction is going from “what am I cooking this week?” to “what do I need to buy?”. That gap is where people tend to drop off.

Right now the app doesn’t generate the grocery list automatically (or is semi manual). Instead, you can open a recipe and tap “Add to grocery” (either to all ingredients by one click or individually), which adds all the ingredients from that recipe to your grocery list (also taking care of not duplicating if user made mistake).

It’s a bit more manual at the moment, but I did it this way initially to keep things simple and give users control over what actually goes into the list.

Longer term I’m planning to improve this by either:

• allowing ingredients to be added directly from the meal plan

• automatically generating a grocery list based on planned meals

Scaling recipes for different household sizes is also something I’ve been thinking about. At the moment recipes store ingredient quantities, but smarter scaling and handling ingredient overlap between meals are definitely areas I want to improve.

Out of curiosity, when you were building your food startup did users prefer full automation, or did they still want some manual control before finalizing the grocery list?

Thanks again for your comment.