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Meals Hub is the new recipe and shopping app from Albertsons Companies, built by the same team behind Mealime, which is being discontinued on October 21, 2026. Mealime users are being transitioned over to Meals Hub.
Meals Hub is free to use and is available within Albertsons Companies’ grocery apps, including Albertsons, Safeway, Vons, Jewel-Osco, and other associated stores.
Key Features:
Meals Hub combines recipe discovery, meal planning, and grocery shopping into a single app tied to Albertsons stores. You can browse recipes, build a plan for the week, and add ingredients straight to your cart, with sales and coupons built into the recipe browsing experience.
What I Like:
- You can set a budget while meal planning, and the app helps you stay within it.
- There’s a dedicated section for dietary preferences and food restrictions.
- The app nudges you to build your plan each week so it doesn’t fall off your radar.
- You can mark recipes as “Cooked” to keep track of what’s left in your plan.
- Recipes walk you through cooking step by step without needing to touch your screen.
- Pick a recipe and add its ingredients directly to your Albertsons cart.
- The app flags which ingredients are on sale and lets you filter for “deal recipes.”
- Clip coupons for items directly in the app.
- Choose to build a shopping list to shop from, or send items straight to your cart.
- Take a photo of an existing shopping list and add those items to your cart.
- The planning tool is included at no cost inside the grocery app.
What Could Be Better:
- Serving sizes are limited to preset options of 2, 4, or 6, so you can’t set an exact number to match your household.
- There’s no recipe clipper tool. Adding your own recipes happens manually through a URL or image, but when I tested this feature, it wasn’t working.
- There’s no calendar option for planning. Meals Hub gives you a general plan for the week without letting you assign recipes to specific days.
- Grocery pickup and delivery are only available through Albertsons-owned stores.
- The recipe library is large, which starts to feel overwhelming when you’re just trying to pick a few meals.
- Recipes can’t be organized and sorted into your own categories or folders.
Who Is Meals Hub For?
Meals Hub is best suited for shoppers loyal to Albertsons, Safeway, Vons, or another Albertsons-owned store, and who don’t need to plan meals around a specific day of the week.
How Meals Hub Differs from Plan to Eat
Meals Hub and Plan to Eat serve two different types of meal planners. Meals Hub works well if you don’t need to plan around a specific schedule and you shop at Albertsons-associated stores. Plan to Eat is built for planners who want to plan meals on specific days of the week, and it isn’t tied to one grocery chain. It works with multiple providers, including Instacart, Kroger, Walmart, and Amazon Fresh.
| Meals Hub | Plan to Eat | |
|---|---|---|
| Recipe collection | Curated by Albertsons with the option to add your own | Built by you, with a clipper tool that saves recipes from social media and websites, plus options to import from photos or type recipes in manually |
| Meal planner | Gives you a general list of meals for the week with no calendar. There’s no way to assign a recipe to a specific day | Calendar-based, so you can schedule recipes to exact days, or use the same flexible, unscheduled approach if that fits your household better |
| Shopping list | Build a list or send ingredients straight to your Albertsons cart, with sales and coupons built in | Organize your list to match the aisles of your preferred store, and shop from multiple lists if you split shopping between stores |
| Reusing meal plans | Shows your past cooked meals, but not the meal plan as a whole | Menus feature lets you save entire past meal plans and reuse them whenever you want |
| Serving sizes | Limited to 2,4, or 6 | Fully editable, with a customizable serving size to match exactly how many people you’re feeding |
| Grocery providers | Albertsons-owned stores only | Instacart, Kroger, Walmart, Amazon Fresh, and more |
Final Thoughts
Meals Hub is a good fit if you’re already an Albertsons shopper and don’t mind planning without a calendar. The budget targeting, sale recipe filtering, and direct-to-cart shopping are genuinely useful if your grocery routine already runs through Albertsons stores.
If you shop elsewhere, need to plan meals around specific days, or want a recipe collection built from your own favorites rather than a curated library, Plan to Eat offers a more flexible and robust planning and shopping experience.
If you’re coming from Mealime, you can read more about making the switch from Mealime to Plan to Eat.
If you’d like to try Plan to Eat, sign up for a free trial.
Read my other meal-planning app reviews here.
