MealBrain

A complete kitchen management system — recipes, shopping, pantry stock and meal plans, joined up, for a family of five.

Why I built it

Cooking for five every day is a planning problem disguised as a cooking problem. The question is never what to cook; it is what is already in the house, what is about to go off, and what everyone will actually eat.

The problem

Recipes live in one app, the shopping list in another, the pantry in a spreadsheet or in your head. Nothing is connected, so the same work gets done repeatedly and food quietly expires in the cupboard.

What I was using before

A recipe app and a shared shopping list, with a weekly guess in between. The list did not know what was in the pantry, and the pantry was not written down anywhere.

What it does

• A recipe library, enriched with proper ingredient mappings
• Pantry stock that knows what is actually in the house
• A weekly meal planner that plans against the stock rather than from scratch
• A shopping list that syncs both ways, so crossed-off items land in the pantry
• A daily check-in that asks what was cooked and updates the picture

Where it is now

In production since June 2026, used every day by the household. It is the project here with the clearest evidence of value: it changed what happens in the kitchen without anyone having to remember to maintain it.

Who it might interest

Anyone feeding a family on a real schedule. It is also the best illustration of the thing I keep arguing — the useful automation is not the impressive one, it is the one that removes a small decision you make every single day.