AI Meal Planner

AI Meal Planner
Photo by Kim Deachul / Unsplash

Food Loops has a new feature that allows you to do meal planning from a simple picture of your refrigerator, pantry, freezer, or even a counter full of food.

The meal planner supports several inputs:

  • Number of people
  • Days of meals
  • Meal type: breakfast, lunch, dinner
  • Context: You can add anything here you'd like to help the AI assistant produce the type of results you'd like, for example, "We have 2 kids, so try to make it kid-friendly."

One great feature is the ability to recommend additional foods to purchase. This can help complement what you already have and expand the meal options available.

Works With Your Dietary Restrictions

Of course, any dietary restrictions you added to Food Loops will also be factored in:

Meal Planning Is Now In Vogue

The cost of food has increased an astounding 23.6% since the start of the pandemic, which has more and more people skipping restaurants, fast food, and carry-outs.

To put this in perspective, the inflation from 2015 to 2019 for food prices was 5.6%

Meal planning with AI can be a powerful tool to utilize existing food that might have been thrown out, or even use up items in your pantry more effectively and "tastily".

U.S. food prices rose by 23.6 percent from 2020 to 2024 | Economic Research Service
From 2020 to 2024, the all-food Consumer Price Index (CPI) rose 23.6 percent, a higher increase than the all-items CPI, which grew 21.2 percent over the same period. Transportation prices grew the fastest across categories, with an increase of 34.4 percent between 2020–24, while housing increased at a similar rate as food, by 23.0 percent. Food price increases in 2020–21 were largely driven by shifting consumption patterns and supply chain disruptions resulting from the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. In 2022, food prices increased faster than any year since 1979, due in part to a highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) outbreak and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which compounded other economy-wide inflationary pressures such as high energy costs. Food price growth slowed in 2023 and 2024 as wholesale food prices and these other inflationary factors eased across industries.
Economic Research Service U.S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE

Food Loops aims to make this process as simple as possible with this new meal planner feature.

Getting Started

To start using Food Loops, head over to the download page and start your free trial. Once in Food Loops, tap the "plus" at the bottom and select the Meal Planner.