Meal planning
Flexible weekly planning built around your recipes
Meal Plans let readers organize your recipes into real, dated plans - a full week, a few dinners, or anything in between - then turn the whole plan into one shopping list. Publishers can also offer their own ready-made plans, free or paid (see the Meal plan products doc for the commerce side).
On this page
What readers experience
From the Meal Plans tab (or the “Create Plan” banner), a reader can:
- create a plan with a name, a length (preset day counts or a custom number), a start date, and default servings
- fill each day's slots - Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Snack, and more - with recipes from your site
- add manual meals (“takeout Friday”) and leftovers entries that carry a meal forward
- attach a personal note to any meal
- rearrange meals across days and slots
- start a plan on a chosen date so it maps to their actual calendar, and stop or reschedule it anytime
- generate a consolidated grocery list from the whole plan
- browse and save ready-made plans offered by your site
Readers can plan without an account, but signing in keeps plans available across devices.
Creating a plan
Plan setup is deliberately light: name it, pick how many days (with a custom option for odd lengths), choose a start date and servings, and go. There's no forced “7 dinners” template - 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 pull in recipes from your archive (search works inside the picker), duplicate favorites across days, mark leftovers, and drop in manual entries for meals that aren't recipes. Notes let them record tweaks - “double the sauce”, “kids' version, skip the chili.”
Living with a plan
Once started, a plan lines up with real dates. Readers see what's for dinner tonight, can open the recipe (and jump straight into Cook Mode), and adjust on the fly when life happens - swap a meal, push a day, mark leftovers.
One-tap shopping lists
The signature move: generate a shopping list from the plan. Allspice consolidates ingredients across every recipe in the plan - normalized and combined, scaled to servings - into a single grocery list the reader can shop, print, or send to a delivery partner. A week of your recipes becomes one trip to the store.
Publisher plans
Your site can offer its own plans alongside readers' personal ones. Ready-made plans appear in a dedicated carousel in the Meal Plans 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 (intro write-up plus sample days), save or purchase it, then schedule it onto their own calendar and generate its shopping list like any other plan.
The full publisher tooling for building, packaging, pricing, and selling plans is covered in Meal Plan Products.
Why it matters for your site
- Repeat visits by design. A reader with an active plan built from your recipes has a reason to come back every single day it runs.
- Deeper archive usage. Filling seven days of slots pulls readers well past your most recent posts and into your back catalog.
- The full loop stays on-site. Plan → shop → cook, all inside your experience: meal planning connects directly to grocery lists, delivery partners, and Cook Mode.
- A new product surface. Your expertise in “what to cook this week” becomes a sellable product - plans you author can be offered free, one-time purchase, subscription, or bundled with Allspice Premium.
What you can configure
- Offer 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.
- Chat topics. Meal planning is one of the Pico topic areas you can enable or disable per domain; where enabled, readers can get planning help conversationally.
- Entry points. The Meal Plans experience lives in the widget; the in-widget “Create Plan” banner promotes it, and your plans carousel appears when you've published plans.
- Feature toggles. Per-domain control over widget areas and tabs (including meal plans) is rolling out in the portal.
Even one well-made free plan (“5 weeknight dinners from this site”) is a powerful introduction - it teaches readers the plan → shop → cook loop with your content, and warms them up for premium plans.
FAQ
Is meal planning free for readers?
Yes - building and using personal plans is part of the core experience. Individual publisher 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 all share a plan.
What happens to the grocery list if the plan changes?
Readers can regenerate the shopping list from the plan's current state at any time.
Can readers use recipes from other sites in a plan?
Plans in your widget are built around your site's recipes plus the reader's manual entries.