A Meal Planning App That Imports Your Recipes

Here's the modern dinner paradox: you've never saved more recipes, and you've never been less sure what's for dinner. The TikToks are bookmarked, the pins are pinned, the cookbook has sticky notes — and on Tuesday at 5pm you're staring into the fridge anyway. The problem isn't a shortage of recipes or a shortage of planning apps. It's that most meal planners start from their recipe catalog, while your recipes live everywhere else. What you want is the other way around: a planner that starts by importing yours.

Why most meal planners don't stick

Plenty of apps will hand you a pre-made plan of their own recipes. That works for about a week, until the plan collides with reality: you don't want their sheet-pan chicken, you want the gochujang noodles from that reel you saved, your mom's chili, and the Tuscan soup on page 74. If getting those into the planner means retyping them, you won't — and the planner quietly becomes another abandoned app.

So when you're shopping for a meal planning app, the first question isn't "how pretty is the calendar?" It's "can it ingest the recipes I already save, from the places I actually save them?" Everything downstream — the plan, the grocery list, actually cooking — depends on that answer.

Step 1: Get the recipes in (from anywhere)

This is the part Mium was built around. One library, fed from every direction:

• TikTok and Instagram — share a post to Mium and it reads the caption, the slideshow frames, and the creator's linked recipe page into a clean recipe. (How that works.)
• Pinterest and YouTube — pins import by following the pin back to its source recipe; YouTube imports read the video description and pinned comment. (Details here.)
• Recipe websites — paste or share any link and Mium pulls out the recipe, leaving the ads and the life story behind.
• Physical cookbooks — photograph the pages and Mium reads them into structured recipes, a whole chapter at a time. (The scanning guide.)
• Handwritten cards and family recipes — Mium reads handwriting too, and anything that exists nowhere else can be typed in; manual entry is unlimited and free.

Imports are 5 a week free — enough to build a real library over a few weekends — and Mium Plus removes the cap for heavy importers.

Step 2: Give each dinner a day

The Plan tab is deliberately boring, in the best way: a week board. Pick a recipe, pick a day, done. No servings algebra required up front, no forced breakfast-lunch-dinner grid to fill, no subscription — planning is free for everyone and never touches your import allowance.

The point of the board isn't the board. It's that the recipe from a reel, the recipe from a cookbook page, and the recipe from a blog all behave identically once they're planned. Monday doesn't care where Monday's dinner came from.

Step 3: Let the plan write the grocery list

This is where importing everything into one place pays off hardest. Open the grocery list and every planned recipe's ingredients are combined into one list, grouped by supermarket aisle — produce together, dairy together. Duplicates merge with real math (two recipes wanting garlic become one line with the combined amount), and each planned meal is a tappable chip, so if Thursday turns into pizza night, one tap checks off everything only Thursday needed.

The list also knows you own salt. Common pantry staples — and anything on your own pantry list — get set aside into their own section instead of cluttering the list, with a one-tap "add back" if the guess is wrong. And if it's a delivery week, the whole list can be handed to Instacart in a tap, where Instacart is available. (The grocery-list guide goes deeper on all of this.)

Step 4: Cook it — and let Siri answer the nightly question

On iPhone, the plan doesn't even require opening the app. Ask Siri what's for dinner and you'll hear tonight's planned meal; you can find recipes by ingredient or add a meal to the plan by voice, and a Home Screen widget shows the week at a glance. (More in the Siri guide.) At the stove, step-by-step Cook Mode keeps your place, and the AI Chef rides along on every recipe to scale servings, suggest swaps, and explain techniques.

Other good options

Honest corner: Mium isn't the only app that pairs importing with planning, and depending on what you weight most, these are worth a look (pricing and features as of mid-2026 — check each app's site for current details):

• ReciMe (~$39.99/yr) also imports from social video and scans cookbooks, with meal planning included. It's the closest overall comparison to Mium — we compare them directly here.
• AnyList is beloved for its shopping list and imports from recipe websites; it doesn't do cookbook scanning or social-video import.
• Paprika (pay-once) imports from websites and has a solid planner, but as of mid-2026 the shipping version has no AI, cookbook scanning, or social import.

If your recipes come mostly from websites, several of these will serve you well. If they come from everywhere — reels, pins, shelves, and drawers — the import breadth is the deciding feature, and it's the one Mium leads with.

Frequently asked questions