Why I Built MealPractice

My MealPractice

I’ve been cooking weeknight dinners for my family for a little over three years now. This has been a great way to provide nutritious meals for my kids and maintain a healthy diet for myself. Initially, I relied on meal delivery kits for cooking inspiration. These services removed the decision-making process and helped me learn about cooking and how ingredients work together.

Of course, the flaw in these services is that they’re packaging fresh ingredients and shipping them across the country in a box filled with ice. It’s not very economical. Once I was a little more comfortable in the kitchen I switched to meal planning sites that provided weekly recipes and allowed me to purchase ingredients locally.

While these worked well for a while, I eventually became frustrated with the limited options and the lack of customization. In particular they don’t cater to the core meals that you make most often.

Mealpractice makes it easy to add your core meals

The existing meal planning sites I've used have beautiful interfaces for creating shopping lists and building out menus. But when it comes to users adding their own recipes the process is cumbersome at best.

This is fine if you’re going to rely 100% on the recipes from a single site for all your meals. But in my experience there simply aren’t enough recipes on any one app matching my tastes and nutritional goals. After a few months the recipes being suggested are mostly thing’s I’ve either cooked before or rejected in the past.

Therefore the first goal for MealPractice.com is to make it easy for users to add their own recipes to their recipe book. This is accomplished through automated ingredient parsing, easy image uploads, and a recipe builder augmented by artificial intelligence.

Mealpractice allows you to track the meals you actually eat.

After three years of making weeknight dinners, I've found a handful of recipes that I make at least once a month. While trying new recipes is fun, having a set of core meals provides a number of benefits.

For starters it makes it them really easy to cook. Since I’ve made the meals numerous times, I can usually whip them up with only a few glances at the recipe. Additionally, they are both delicious and meet my nutritional goals.

Here too existing mealplanning sites fall short as they make it hard to find the recipes you’ve made most often. Usually they provide some kind of favorites list, but you have to keep it up to date. Forgot to add a meal you liked? Good luck digging through all your old menus to find it.

The second goal of Mealpractice is to effortlessly track every meal made and make the data accessible. Users can quickly sort their recipe book by the most frequently made meals or filter for meals that haven't been made in a certain time period.

By tracking the meals that are actually eaten, Mealpractice makes it easier to plan, shop, and cook for your core meals.