Meal planning
Flexible weekly planning built around your recipes
Readers can put your recipes into dated plans, from a few dinners to a full week, and turn a whole plan into one shopping list. You can also offer your own ready-made plans, free or paid (see Meal plan products).
On this page
What readers experience
From the widget's Meal Plan tab (Plan in the floating widget) or the “Create Plan” banner, a reader can:
- create a plan with a name, a length (3, 5, 7, or 14 days, or a custom number), a start date, and default servings
- fill each day's slots - Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Snack, and Other - with recipes from your site
- add manual meals (“takeout Friday”) and leftovers that carry an earlier meal forward
- add a note to any meal
- move or duplicate meals across days and slots
- start a plan on a chosen date so it lines up with their calendar, and stop or reschedule it anytime
- turn the whole plan into one grocery list
- browse your site's ready-made plans
Readers can build their own plans without an account; signing in keeps plans available across devices. Opening one of your ready-made plans, even a free one, asks the reader to create a free account first. Once they sign up, the plan opens on its own.
Creating a plan
Setup takes a few fields: a name, how many days, a start date, and servings. There's no fixed “7 dinners” template, so a plan can be three dinners, a weekend of baking, or a full week of three meals a day.
Building the days
Each day is a row of meal slots. Readers add recipes from your archive (the picker has search), duplicate meals across days, mark leftovers, and add manual entries for meals that aren't recipes. Notes hold tweaks like “double the sauce” or “kids' version, skip the chili.”
Living with a plan
Once started, a plan follows real dates. Readers see what's planned for today, can open a recipe and go straight into Cook Mode with Start Cooking, and can swap or move meals when plans change.
One-tap shopping lists
Generate Grocery List combines the ingredients from every recipe in the plan, scaled to servings, into one grocery list the reader can shop, print, or send to a delivery partner. Manual entries and leftovers have no ingredients, so they aren't included.
Publisher plans
Your site can offer its own plans alongside readers' personal ones. They appear in a carousel in the Meal Plan tab - free plans, paid plans with locked previews, or plans included with Allspice Premium, depending on how you package them. Readers can preview a plan (its intro and sample days), open or buy it, then schedule it onto their own calendar and generate its shopping list like any other plan.
Building, pricing, and selling plans is covered in Meal Plan Products.
Why it matters for your site
A reader with an active plan built from your recipes has a reason to come back every day it runs, and filling a week of slots takes them past your newest posts into your archive. Planning connects to grocery lists and Cook Mode, so plan, shop, and cook all happen on your site. Plans you write can also be sold (see Meal Plan Products).
What you can configure
- Your own plans. Build plans from your recipes in the Publisher Portal (day-by-day builder, AI-assisted generation, intro and per-day write-ups), then publish them free or attach them to paid products. See Meal Plan Products and Configure payouts.
- Links to plans. Link any button, menu item, or email to
#allspice-mealplansto open your meal plans, or to#allspice-mealplans-{productId}(for example#allspice-mealplans-prod_XXXX) to open one specific plan. These work on any page where the plugin is active. See Link hashes. - Meal plans page. The plugin's Pages section can create a Meal Plans page for you as a draft (see Generated pages).
- Where Allspice appears. Page visibility controls which pages show the widget, by path. There is no separate switch for the meal plan tab.
A single free plan (“5 weeknight dinners from this site”) shows readers how plan, shop, and cook work with your recipes, and introduces your paid plans.
FAQ
Is meal planning free for readers?
Yes. Building and using personal plans is free. Your own plans can be free or paid, depending on how you package them.
Can a plan mix recipes and non-recipes?
Yes. Recipes from your site, manual entries, and leftovers can share a plan.
What happens to the grocery list if the plan changes?
Readers can generate a new list from the plan's current state at any time.
Can readers use recipes from other sites in a plan?
No. Plans in your widget use your site's recipes plus the reader's manual entries.