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Recently, I reached out to the members of our Facebook Group to ask for advice for new meal planners. Per usual, our customers didn’t disappoint and sent some great advice on how to get started as a Plan to Eat newbie.
Here are some of the golden meal planning tips they shared:
1. Set up your grocery store aisles. Instead of using the default ones that come with the app, set up all the aisles as you find them in your grocery store. Then, when you add items to the grocery list, they will be in the right aisle.
The categories of your grocery list are customizable! We recommend updating them to match the aisles of your favorite grocery store, so you can shop aisle-by-aisle with your list rather than backtracking or forgetting items. This customization is going to save you so much time when you grocery shop.
2. Make new Plan to Eat Friends to share recipes with! It’s a quick way to build up your recipe book.
Adding Friends is a great way to get some recipe inspiration and discover something new. If you already know people who use the app, you can invite them to be friends and then browse their recipe book and save recipes to your account. If you don’t know anyone who uses Plan to Eat, join our Facebook Group to find and connect with other meal planners!
3. Take advantage of all the ways of importing recipes, even basic ones. I started mine by adding friends and saving copies of theirs. Now I import from webpages on my phone or tablet using the recipe clipper, and more recently have been using the “take a photo” way, with handwritten recipes or from books or product labels.
Plan to Eat has so many ways to add recipes to your account, from clipping recipes directly from Instagram to taking a photo from a cookbook. When you’re new to Plan to Eat, we recommend adding your family’s favorite recipes first, so you can get started planning, and then continue to add recipes to keep things interesting!
4. Use the Plan to Eat Calendar as your day-to-day calendar. Add your highlights of the day under Notes.
One of the most common ways to meal plan is to plan around your schedule. Take a look at your weekly calendar and make note of what you have going on. To keep things streamlined, you can add Notes to your meal planner to reduce the back-and-forth between calendars. Taking a moment to review the week ahead will give shape and structure to your meal planning.
New to Plan to Eat? Check out our Plan to Eat 101 Playlist on YouTube for more tips and ways to get started!
