Mealo
An iOS meal planner my partner and I actually use. Plan the week together, then shop from one list.
- Role
- Solo build. Product, design, and full-stack engineering.
- Type
- iOS app · consumer
- Status
- Live on the App Store
01
The problem
Mealo started at my kitchen table. Every week my partner and I would ask each other the same two questions: what are we making for dinner, and what do we need to buy? And every week we ended up with overlapping ingredients, plans that did not line up, and a fridge of half-used food going to waste.
I wanted one place where we could plan the week together, see what each other was cooking, and turn the whole plan into a single shopping list, so we would buy what we would actually use.
02
Plan the week together
The planner is a shared calendar for the week. Each meal is tagged with who is cooking it, so my partner and I plan in the same place instead of keeping separate lists or texting each other about dinner.
It also keeps a running count of meals planned and ingredients reused for the week, so the plan quietly nudges you toward overlap rather than buying something new for every single meal.
03
One shopping list, not two
The shopping list rolls every meal in the week up into a single list, with ingredients shared across recipes counted once. Reducing food waste was the whole point, so overlap turns into savings instead of a second trip.
You can filter by what you still need versus what is already checked off, and group the list by category, meal, or cuisine, so a real grocery run is one organized pass instead of hunting through a flat list.
04
Snap a meal into a recipe
Point the camera at a dish or your ingredients and Mealo identifies what it is and drafts a recipe you can save and drop into the plan. It is the fastest way to get something into your library without typing it all out.
The recognition runs on Gemini rather than a larger model. For a consumer app doing a lot of scans, it is far cheaper to run while still reliably reading a dish and turning it into a usable recipe, which is what made the feature viable to ship.
05
A cookbook you actually reuse
Everything you cook or capture lands in a meal library you can search, favorite, and organize into cookbooks. Predefined meals give you something to plan with on day one, before you have built up your own.
Because the library feeds the planner, planning a week gets faster the more you use the app. You are choosing from meals you already know instead of starting from a blank page every Sunday.
06
Key decisions
Built solo with AI coding tools
I built Mealo end to end on my own, the iOS app, the backend, and the landing page, leaning on Codex, ChatGPT, and Claude Code to move at the pace of a small team without being one.
Plan-first, not recipe-first
Most meal apps lead with a recipe database. Mealo leads with the week and derives the shopping list from it, so the daily interaction stays light instead of turning into data entry.
Ingredient reuse as a first-class feature
The app aggregates ingredients across the week and surfaces how many were reused, so cutting food waste is something the product measures, not an afterthought.
Designed for two people
Every meal shows who is cooking it, so a household shares one plan. The product assumes you are planning with someone, not alone.
07
Branding
Mealo's identity is deliberately playful: a small cast of food characters led by a spoon and a fork, warm oranges, and rounded type. The tone sits closer to Duolingo than a utility app, friendly enough that planning dinner feels light instead of like another chore.
