Meal Planner App With Shopping List That Starts From Recipes You Already Saved

Rose · 19 September 2026

A meal planner app with a shopping list should do two jobs: decide what you are eating this week, and turn that into one list you can shop from. Yumzi does both, and starts from the cooking videos already saved on your phone rather than a recipe library you have to browse from scratch.

What does a meal planner app with a shopping list actually need to do?

Three things, in order.

Pick the dinners. Not suggest forty, pick the handful you will actually cook.

Merge the ingredients. Two dinners that both want spring onion should produce one bunch of spring onion on the list, not two lines you have to reconcile in the shop.

Group the list so you can walk the shop once, top to bottom, instead of doubling back for the thing you missed in aisle two.

Most planners do the first and the third. The merge is where they differ, and it is the part that decides whether the list is usable or just a transcription of your recipes.

The input differs too. Samsung Food’s Help Center lists five documented ways a recipe gets in, and four of them are a link or typing; the fifth is a camera scan of a written recipe. None of them takes a video.

How is Yumzi different from other meal planner apps?

The input. Other planners start from their own recipe library or a web link. Yumzi starts from videos you saved on TikTok or Instagram, and reads the recipe out of the video itself, including the spoken track and the text that flashes on screen, so a reel with no caption still produces amounts.

That matters because the dinners you actually want to cook are usually the ones you saved while watching someone make them, not the ones you found by browsing a library at six in the evening.

Once the recipes are in, the rest is ordinary planner work done properly: a weekly dinner plan scored against the Schijf van Vijf, duplicate ingredients merged across the week into one buyable quantity, and the list grouped by aisle category so produce sits with produce.

What does it cost, and what do you get for free?

Yumzi is free while it is in early access. Reading a recipe out of a video is the part that costs money to run, so a paid tier for heavy use is planned. Planning your week and building the shopping list stay free.

What are the honest limits?

Two worth knowing before you download anything.

Yumzi never invents a recipe. When a video has no spoken amounts and no on-screen text, a music-only montage for instance, it tells you it could not read one instead of filling the gap with a plausible guess. A wrong ingredient list is worse than no list, because you only find out at the pan.

The Albert Heijn hand-off is the Netherlands only. Everywhere else you get the finished list to shop from yourself, which is most of what the planner is for, but the one-tap basket step is a Dutch feature because it runs on Albert Heijn’s own product ids.

Who should use something else?

If your recipes live on food blogs rather than in your saved videos, a URL-based planner like Plan to Eat or Paprika will serve you better, because a link importer is exactly the right tool for a page that already has the recipe written out. Yumzi is built for the other case, where the recipe was never written down anywhere.