I have some tea to spill. I feel like I’ve been keeping a very valuable secret, but it’s been for good reason. Before I shared this tea, I wanted to thoroughly experience implementing it in my life before taking the time to write about it and share it with An Eye to Simplifiers.

I am not exaggerating when I say using this tool has been a game-changer for simplifying four things that are usually unenjoyable, mildly chaotic, time sucks in my life –

1. Organizing recipes
2. Meal planning
3. Grocery Shopping
4. Cooking

The tool I’m referring to is an app called Plan to Eat. It’s designed to organize your recipes, simplify meal planning, manage grocery shopping, and make cooking from recipes far easier than the way most people handle these tasks today.

Before I go further, I just want to note that An Eye to Simplify and myself are in no way affiliated with Plan to Eat other than as a paying subscriber. I discovered this app through research I was doing for two An Eye to Simplify clients last November. It seemed to be a good solution to help them both achieve their simplification goals around organizing recipes and meal planning. Having no experience with the app, I wanted to try it out along with the clients to develop my own opinion about it, and understand any feedback they may have about it. I’m taking the time to write this post and share my experience simply because I am a satisfied user.

The 10 Second Summary of Benefits

As published on the Plan to Eat website, the app is designed to “Take the mental load out of dinner. Plan once, shop once, and enjoy more home-cooked meals without the stress.”

Ummm…yes, please!!! Where do I sign up?!?!

Plan to Eat Free Trial

I loved Plan to Eat from the second I downloaded their app because they offer a 14-day free trial.  No strings, hidden fee, credit card requirement or passive subscription, attached! What their trial offer told me from the beginning is that they are truly interested in simplifying my life AND not adding additional complication to it.

SOLD…on the free trial!

Once registered, I jumped right in to explore the app. The user-experience was intuitive. I did watch a couple YouTube videos demonstrating how to use some different features of the app but mostly navigated myself through it with ease.

Uploading & Organizing Recipes

Before you can use the meal planning and grocery shopping features of the app, you have to first add recipes to your personal library.

Plan to Eat does have a small library for users to access and save recipes to their personal library, but you’re definitely going to want to upload your own.

Luckily, Plan to Eat makes that easy. Using AI text scanning, you can store your favorite recipes from hardcopy recipe cards, books, magazines, printouts, and screenshots into Plan to Eat’s standard recipe template. In addition, you can upload those delicious recipes you come across on social media within seconds using Plan to Eat’s import feature.

There are some social media content requirements for the recipe to import correctly. I’ve found that most recipes I’ve tried to import meet those requirements. There have been some that haven’t, but I just took that as a sign that I really don’t need that recipe in my Plan to Eat recipe library and move on. Problem solved!

In the first couple of months of my usage, I noticed the AI text scanning would misinterpret fractions (i.e., ½ cup) and random words here and there, but I haven’t had that issue lately, so perhaps Plan to Eat has recently improved that function.

Before saving any recipe – uploaded or input manually, you can tag it by –

• Course
• Cuisine
• Main Ingredient
• Others specified by you

You can then filter by these categories when searching for a particular recipe in your library.

Meal Planning

Once you have at least a handful or two of recipes in your library, you can begin to make a daily meal plan for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks with a simple tap on the recipe to add it to your meal calendar where you want.

Right now, I mostly use the app for dinner planning because I can usually wing the other meals in my day. The app would definitely be a great tool for those who want/need to create a complete meal plan. Perhaps one day, I’ll graduate to that level.

Grocery Shopping List

As you add recipes to your meal calendar, the ingredients needed to make the recipe are automatically captured on a grocery list in the app. Just one more amazing feature of this app! No longer do I have to read and analyze numerous recipes to make my own shopping list! The Plan to Eat app does it for me! It is probably my favorite feature of the app.

Once all my meals have been chosen, and the shopping list is final, I shop my kitchen for the items on the list and check off what I already have. What I’m left with are the items I do not have, therefore need to purchase at the grocery store.

Once at the grocery store. I pull the list up on the app and check off items as I put them in my cart. The great thing about the app, while using the list, is that my phone screen does not go black, nor does my phone lock. The list stays illuminated on my phone until I close it.

Online Ordering

If you prefer leaving your grocery shopping to someone else, you can order your groceries through Instacart and participating grocery stores  directly in the app from your shopping list. You can order all items from one place or select which items you want to order from each grocery store.

Since I like to do my own grocery shopping, I have not tried this function, but I’ve been told by clients that it works well.

Cooking with Recipes

After uploading recipes, planning meals, and doing grocery shopping, you can now efficiently cook using the app to refer to the recipe. Because all recipes are saved in the same Plan to Eat template, you will quickly learn to navigate any recipe you pull up.

While you have a recipe pulled up, the app stays open, and your screen stays on until you turn it off, just like the app does for looking at the grocery list, so there’s no having to constantly touch your device with messy cooking hands.

An Eye to Simplify Client Testimonials

“I use it [Plan to Eat app] everyday and every week! The more I use it, the more I like it. It gets easier to use and I also find more fun functions it has.”  – B.G., app user

“I love that [sharing recipes] feature! I like the step-by-step [recipe] instructions too. – P.H., app user

Closing Thoughts

The Plan to Eat app is absolutely worth trialing for the free, 14-days, no strings attached period. That gives you adequate time to explore and use the app to form your own thoughts on it.

While the app, doesn’t take 100% of the work associated with meals off your plate (I think you’d have to pay a personal chef for that! lol), it has the potential to remove numerous hours a week searching for recipes, meal planning, grocery shopping, and cooking from your life.

After your 14-day trial, if you decide the app is worth the $5.95/mo or $49/year subscription fee then you can proceed with providing Plan to Eat with your billing information.

As a subscriber, you will be able to refer others using your own referral code to give them 20% off their first annual subscription and you earn a 20% lifetime commission on their subscription payments.

If you trial Plan to Eat and love the app as much as I do, receive 20% off your annual subscription by clicking here or entering the referral code ANEYETOSIMPLIFY20 at check-out.

I’d love to hear from you if you become a user of Plan to Eat. We can share tips, tricks, and recipes.

Simply yours,