How to Get Started with a Shared Family Meal Planning App
Everyday life is busier than ever. Sometimes (most of the time?), life feels like an endless parade of rushing around to get to school, work, appointments, and extracurricular activities on time. When you have a family, everyone’s different schedule can feel chaotic and hard to keep track of!
To make matters worse, every day, you must make the most dreaded decision of the day: what to have for dinner! So many things play into dinnertime. What are you eating? Do you have the ingredients? Who’s cooking that night?
Keeping track of mealtimes is one of the most important ways to keep you and your family happy and healthy! Downloading a Family Meal Planner will completely change the way you do dinner.
What Are The Benefits of Using a Shared Family Meal Planner?
How many times have you heard, “What’s for dinner? Oh, I don’t want that!” It can be tiring to be the only one who not only decides what everyone eats, makes the grocery list, grocery shops, and then cooks the meal. When you have a family unit, everyone who is old enough should be pitching in!
Once you start recruiting your family members to lend a hand, you will notice a significant difference in how easy meal planning is. Some of the benefits of using a shared family meal planner is:
Never Run Out Of Food: Without an organized list, it is all too easy to forget important items from the store. With a shared family meal planner, whenever someone sees that there is something that needs to be replenished, they can add it to the list!
Promote a Healthy Diet: It’s safe to say that almost everyone has gone to the store without a game plan, which usually means buying too many snacks! If you have a list and a plan of attack, you can stick to a healthy grocery list that fits your meal plan and your budget.
Set Aside Time for Family Meals to Connect: Nowadays, it’s all too easy to get caught up in the hustle and bustle of everyday life, but you can now plan and schedule family dinners for everyone to enjoy.
Make Sure You Get Everything at the Grocery Store in One Trip: You can now add all of your groceries to a convenient list so that way you won’t forget any important ingredients at the store!
Give Everyone an Opportunity to Make Requests: Do your loved ones have a favorite dish that they beg for every week? A shared family meal planner will allow your family to request their favorite meals or preferred snacks.
Have Less Stress Around Meals: It can be frustrating trying to come up with meal ideas and grocery lists on the fly. Using a shared family meal planner allows you to plan ahead and create meal plans and grocery lists so that you are always prepared!
Reduce Impulsive Food Choices: Indulge in fewer (not none!) impulsive purchases, since you’ll have a grocery list readily available to you at all times!
How to Plan Your Family’s Meals: Three Options
Every family seems to have their own way of navigating home life. Some families go with the flow, while other families have strict regimes!
Mealtime is a part of life that can feel stressful, as it happens every single day. Here are just some examples of how families organize mealtimes:
Shared Family Meal Planning App
A shared family meal planning app is the ultimate organization tool for families to use when planning their meals for the day, week, and month. It allows multiple family members to be on a shared page, which means that everyone can contribute! This helps eliminate the constant “I don’t know what I want,” as your loved ones can program what they want for meals or snacks as they think of them!
Like any method, it has its benefits and downfalls. A shared family meal planning app is user-friendly and great for keeping everyone up to date and in the loop. It allows each person to update a grocery list, suggest meals, and even assign mealtimes and cooking responsibilities. This can help relieve the responsibility off of one person’s shoulders and share it amongst the family unit.
The only downfall of using this method of mealtime organization is if one or more of the family members forget to contribute. As long as everyone is onboard, this method is an invaluable tool for any family!
Wall Calendar or Whiteboard
The wall calendar or whiteboard walked so that the shared family meal planner could run. Before there was advanced technology, we had a trusty whiteboard and marker to help us keep track of everything we needed. Although it is behind the times, it can still be a good way to organize everything you need for mealtimes.
A benefit of using the wall calendar or whiteboard is that anyone can make adjustments as needed. If it is hung in the kitchen and someone sees an ingredient that needs replacing, all they need to do is walk over to the whiteboard and add the ingredient! Additionally, it is usually placed in an area where everyone can see, meaning that everyone can take a look at the meal plan for the week.
While writing all of your lists and meal plans on the whiteboard works just fine, it also has its limitations. You will either have to re-write your list on a piece of paper or take a picture of the list before you leave for the grocery shop, as you won’t have access to the board once you leave the home. Also, if a family member wants something last minute, but you don’t see their text, they won’t get what they need!
Leave It All to Mom or Dad
Who doesn’t love when someone else does all the work? That’s the case when you let your parents do the meal-planning and grocery shopping. While it can be nice to let someone else take the reins, it also feels just as good to help contribute!
When allowing your mom and dad to do all the work, you don’t have to think about the list or what to eat for dinner. But something to keep in mind is that then you will have no say in what to eat or what groceries need to be purchased.
Key Features of a Shared Family Meal Planning App
You finally decided that it's time to find a shared family meal planning app to help step up your organization game. Keep in mind that not all apps are created equal!
Some apps only have the bare bones when it comes to meal planning, while others have all the bells and whistles! Here are some important features you should consider when downloading a new meal planning app:
Built-In Recipe Library
Who doesn’t love having plenty of recipes at their fingertips? When you decide on a meal planning app, you want to find one that has recipes readily available so that you can easily find fun recipes to fit your cravings.
To take it up a notch, you will want an app that also lets you put in your own recipes. Let’s say that you have grandma’s secret chocolate chip cookie recipe; you want to write it down so that you can have it forever! Having recipes that you can immediately access will make life much easier than if you had to search for hours on the internet for that “perfect” dish.
Powerful Search Tools
You are trying to decide what to make for dinner, but you don’t have the slightest idea of what to make. Do you make kraft mac and cheese for the third night this week, or do you spend hours looking online for a recipe that you don’t even have half the ingredients for? The answer is neither!
While some apps might have a few built-in recipes for you to look at when you’re stuck in a cooking rut, Family Daily has more than 5,000 recipes included for you to choose from! What makes this even better is that you can search for something down to specifics. There are filters for you to narrow down your choices, such as the type of cuisine, cooking time, and even meal type! This will save you plenty of time, so you don’t have to search through dinner options when you’re looking for a sweet treat. Plus, you can even import your own!
Assign a Chef
Who said it had to be mom or dad cooking every night? If your kids are old enough or there are other adults in the house, it’s time to start sharing the workload!
This is a huge benefit of Family Daily. This app allows you to not only track recipes but you can assign chores and cooking duties to your loved ones as well! Never again will little Susie forget it was her night to cook, as she will be the assigned cook for the night!
Create a Shared Grocery List
I can’t tell you the amount of times that I ask my husband what he wants when I go to the store. He tells me he doesn’t know, and then gets upset when he thinks of something at the last minute, and I don’t see his text. This is why a shared grocery list can completely change the way that you grocery shop!
When you create a shared grocery list, all of the family members can add items as needed! This will save you the hassle of harassing your loved ones constantly to tell you what they need, as they can add their items as they think of them!
Choosing the Right Shared Family Meal Planning App for Your Family
There are plenty of different ways for you to organize your meals, but not all are the same! You could always go the old-school route and use the classic whiteboard, but why do this when you can use an app that will keep all your ducks in a row for you?
While using a whiteboard can be great to quickly jot down ideas (if you’re home, that is), an app will allow you to access all of your important information no matter where you are. Family Daily is a prime example of how an app can transform your family organization. With Family Daily, you can enjoy over 5,000 recipes included in the app, extensive filters to find the recipes, assign meal times and responsibilities, and even add ingredients to your shared grocery list with one push of a button!
With all of these great benefits of using Family Daily, there are also some other features that will make using this app nothing but smooth sailing!
User-friendly Interface
Let’s be real: Some apps are more trouble than they’re worth. When looking for an app to help organize your family, you want it to be easy to use and straightforward.
The last thing you want is to spend 10 minutes trying to figure out how to search for a meal! Family Daily was designed in a way that will guide you to all the sections you need without unnecessary clicking.
Cross-Platform Compatibility
Another thing to keep in mind when searching for a shared family meal planner is cross-platform compatibility. This is completely necessary if some family members have iPhones, but others have Androids!
Thankfully, there’s no need to be part of a specific operating system if you want to download Family Daily. Family Daily is available across multiple platforms, now including Android!
Collaboration Features
Something that makes a shared family meal planner successful is the ability to collaborate with your family members. Without this feature, using a shared family meal planner isn’t really all that helpful! Here are some important collab features you can find on Family Daily:
Assign cooks
Share grocery lists
Assign meal times
Reminders and Notifications
Of course, it's easy to put information into an app, but it's another to remember it!
With Family Daily, you will receive reminders and notifications to not only add to the grocery list if need be but to also cook when it’s your turn!
How to Set Up Your Shared Family Meal Planner in Family Daily
You may think that setting up your meal planner will be hard and confusing, but it’s the complete opposite! Using Family Daily, it's easier than ever to find your favorite recipes and create a grocery list to ensure you have all the ingredients. While you will be able to set up your meals with ease, here is a step-by-step guide on how to set up a meal in Family Daily:
Download Family Daily.
Create an account if you don’t have an existing one already.
On the bottom of the toolbar, click “meal plan.”
This page will show you the meals breakfast, lunch, snacks, and dinner. Click on one of these boxes. On the bottom of the next screen, there will be a button that says “add from recipes.” Click this button.
Once you click on one of the boxes, it will populate the extensive recipe library. You can then filter your search through meal type, cuisine, and cook time.
You can click on the recipe of your choosing and select “Add to ___” (This will say whatever meal you clicked on, whether it be breakfast or dinner). Right below this, there is also a button that says “Add to groceries,” where you can automatically add all of the ingredients to your next shopping list.
Then, you will click “Save your changes” and viola! You have a meal in the time slot of your choosing.
Now that we’ve discussed how to plan a meal on the app, we can talk about how to start a new grocery list!
On the bottom toolbar, you will click on “List.”
From here, there will be another button on the bottom that says “Add List.” Click this.
Clicking this will bring you to a page where it will ask you to input information where it says, “List Title.” You can replace this with “Groceries.”
Now that you have added the list title, you can click the area where it says “Tap here to add a list item.” Doing this will allow you to start adding your necessary ingredients.
When you are finished working on your list, you can press “Save” on the top right.
And that’s all there is to it! Using this app to organize your meals will help ensure you always have a plan of attack for meals as well as have all the necessary ingredients to make the meals. We all know how easy it is to forget important ingredients at the grocery store when it comes time to make dinner!
How to Encourage Your Family to Start Using a Shared Family Meal Planner
Taking the plunge is the final step when it comes to upgrading your meal-planning method, right? You may think so, but you’d be wrong! More often than not, when families decide to start using a shared family meal planner, it can be a rough transition.
Why, you may ask? It usually has nothing to do with the app itself but more the family members! Going from group chats or whiteboards to using a shared family app can be a huge adjustment for any family. Here are some of the most common challenges that family units face when switching over to a shared family meal planner:
Resistance to change: It’s safe to say that we’ve all had a time when we may have been a little resistant to change. If you are used to relying on group chats or home whiteboards to plan your meals, it can be difficult to transition to using technology to help plan meal times. This can be even more challenging if some family members are against using a shared family meal planner. You may need to sit down with your loved ones and explain the benefits of using the shared family meal planner and how using it as well will improve the entire family as a unit.
Staying consistent: This one goes hand in hand with resistance to change. You get everyone on board with using the shared family meal planner, but because it's so new, everyone forgets to use it. Staying consistent is the most important way to be successful when using a shared family meal planner. When you are consistent, you will not only gain more experience and comfort using the app but you will also enjoy the benefit of stress-free meal times!
Accountability for cooking meals: With a shared family meal planner, you can assign chefs for different days of the week! Instead of one person carrying the workload of list creating, grocery shopping, and cooking, you can assign tasks to different family members. Because you can assign different family members to cook on various days, a big challenge will be to keep accountability for the specified person to cook on those nights.
Family Daily: The Ultimate Shared Family To Do List App
In this day and age, there’s no reason that anyone should be struggling with planning meals. Utilizing an invaluable shared family meal planner such as Family Daily is the perfect way to streamline your family into a smooth-running machine. With Family Daily, you can search for meals, add ingredients to grocery lists, and even assign family members to cook on different nights!
Family Daily will make your life easier than ever with the easy-to-use interface, compatibility across most devices, and ability for collaboration. What’s even better about this app is that it is not only a meal planner, but it also has a shared family calendar and the capability to create to-do lists!
Family Daily is a one-stop shop when it comes to organizing your family’s lives. Try it for free today!
