5 Best AI Meal Planners Compared: My Brutally Honest Review
AI is revolutionizing everything—even meal planning. But can artificial intelligence really create personalized, nutritious, and tasty recipes tailored to your diet? We tested the top AI-powered meal planners, to see if they live up to the hype—or if they’re just another cash grab. Read on to discover which tools are worth your time and money!
Musely Ai: It's already off to a good start
Not only do you have the ability to generate recipes, but what I find interesting is that Musely AI has other tools, such as one for summarizing or rephrasing texts, and much more besides. Personally, I don't find this so relevant, because in the West, we often consider that the more things we know how to do, the less good we are at what we do. I would have preferred Musely to focus solely on recipe generation and meal planning.Let's go! On to the interface, what's inside?
In fact, the interface isn't all that revolutionary, but it's still pretty simplistic and doesn't swarm with unnecessary details.Let me explain what criteria Musely takes into account when generating your meals.
In fact, meal schedules are generated based on your calories, food preferences and the nutritional goals you've set for yourself. That's enough to let you personalize your recipes.What's more, you get a weekly recipe calendar perfectly tailored to your dietary preferences. It takes into account
breakfast, lunch and dinner, as well as a few snacks for watching Netflix in peace.What I find pretty crazy is that you can choose to add a shopping list to your recipes, i.e. the list of ingredients needed to prepare them.It gets even crazier when you realize that they take it a step further by giving you information on macronutrients and even calories for each meal, allowing you to track your nutritional goals.Oh, I almost forgot: you can choose the cuisine you'd like to eat, whether it's French, Chinese or even Italian. If you can't find a specific cuisine, you can always customize it.For example, if you want Nigerian cuisine, you'll find recipes for that.If your life is too complicated, you can remove a few ingredients if you like.Why is it always too good to be true?I think it's too good to be true. And I'm right!What gets me is generating things quietly, then not being able to anymore because you've reached your limit, and now you have to pay! That's what Musely has done, and you have to pay $5 a month.What may turn you off for sure is the very short refund period: just 3 days. Seriously, what's the big deal? What do you have time for in three days?Personally, I don't recommend this site, but if you still want to give it a try, other payment methods are available and you'll be charged $6.7 per month for a six-month period, a 33% saving compared to the $9.9 per month option.
Foodiprep: a love story (no pun intended)
I can assure you that I've fallen in love with this site. Foodiprep is THE site I'd definitely recommend.
The interface is just incredible, there are so many animations and everything is so beautiful, even if it feels a bit like the food images were generated by artificial intelligence.- At the very beginning, there's a little questionnaire that might put off the laziest among you, but it's no big deal.
- Creating a recipe couldn't be easier: go to the “Create Recipe” tab or, if you're in the ‘Dashboard’ tab, click on “Create a new Recipe”.
- After clicking on the recipe creation tab or button, you're taken to an interface similar to that of text generative AI, in which you actually interact with an AI, just as you would with ChatGPT.
- To give it a try, I entered my prompt by telling Chef Foodie (that's the name of Foodiprep's AI):
- On Foodiprep, you have a Pro subscription plan at $4.99 per month.
- For $8.99/month, you get all the features of the Pro plan, plus access to unlimited generations of recipes thanks to the Nutrition Pro plan. You'll also have access to a totally comprehensive nutritional analysis, including of course calories, protein, fat, fiber, sugar, sodium, cholesterol, carbs... Wow!!!!
- Here, it's even easier: just click on the Make selections button, then choose the type of food (French, American, Japanese, etc.). Treat yourself!
- After following a few steps, you'll finally arrive at your dish. For my part, I got a steak with sautéed sweet potatoes and spinach, and garlic mashed potatoes.
- You'll need to enter your weight, height, goal weight, and the number of weeks for your recipes (4, 6, or 10, it's up to you).
- Then there is a section at the very bottom dedicated to the different types of plant-based diets: vegan, lact-vegetarian, ovo-vegetarian, lacto-ovo vegetarian (I didn't know there was such a thing), pesco-vegetarian, pollo-vegetarian.
- On the small window you have the basic section where you generate your recipes according to your gender (male or female), age, units, weight, height, activity level (sedentary, nomadic, very active, extremely active) and body goal (lose weight, maintain weight, gain weight, etc.).
- In the advanced section, you can indicate your dietary goals, desired calorie count and foods to which you are allergic.Then click on “Generate plan”, and choose the day from which you would like to receive weekly-generated plans.
You should now select two or three recipes for each meal, as your recipes will be generated according to your choices.
You'll get your recipes for breakfast, lunch and dinner from Monday to Friday.
By clicking on each recipe, you'll get a detailed overview of its composition.
ConclusionEach of these sites isn't perfect, but I think they're good enough to generate recipe plans that respect your choices. However, please check on Google whether the calorie content of each food is respected. AIs aren't perfect and can even make mistakes, so I wouldn't recommend referring to Claude AI or ChatGPT if you need to check calorie intake (unless you activate the “Search” option).Among the recipe generators for planned meals, I'd advise you to turn instead to Foodieprep and Planfit, which seem fairly reliable to me. But I wouldn't rule out any of the other sites, it's up to you.
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