About Shopping Planner

ShoppingPlanner is an ambitious project which aims to change the way we look at food and in particular make healthy eating easier by taking the hard work out of meal planning and food shopping.

So if you like the idea of healthier eating and cooking with fresh and raw ingredients rather than relying on processed and pre-packaged foods, ShoppingPlanner has been created for you!

We believe that using our meal planner will increase awareness of what goes into our food, and encourage more of us to prepare meals from raw ingredients rather than relying on processed and pre-packaged foods. It simply takes the meals you've planned on your meal planner, looks at the ingredients needed from your recipes, and then generates your shopping list.

It couldn't be more simple - just click a day, then click a recipe, whether it's breakfast, lunch, dinner, or supper, just add the meals you want each day, and when you're finished, just print out the shopping list.

The software adjusts the ingredient quantities up or down, so if a recipe has been set up for say 4 people, and you are catering for 8, it will double the quantities required. It will also convert 'a pinch' or 'teaspoon' of certain ingredients to 'grams' or 'millilitres' on the shopping list, so you won't need to do the conversions in your head.

Members are already telling us that not only is using our shopping planner easier and quicker than writing a shopping list (especially if you need to research the ingredients from your recipe books!), but you can buy with the confidence that you haven't forgotten that vital ingredient that will drag you back to the store the very next day, so in reality it even saves time over not writing a list!

It might be particularly useful for working parents, carers, and anybody with specific dietary requirements, though since we've been using it, we've unexpectedly found our teenage children also taking a greater interest in planning and preparing meals, so we're sure that most people will find the software useful.

To get the best out of the planning software you really need to invest a little time to set up your favourite recipes in 'personal recipes', but once they're there, you can use them as often as you like, and just think of all the time you'll save having all your favourite recipes in one place when you need them.

You can even copy the 'shared recipes' other members have created into your 'personal recipes' and then edit them to suit your own tastes - a little more crushed chilli for me please!

So go on, try it, and tell us if, like it has for other members, the shopping planner software makes it:

• easy to eat a more varied and healthier diet;
• easy to produce a shopping list quickly;
• easy to get all the ingredients and avoid returns to store;
• easy to find your favourite recipes, just when you need to.

You might even find your shopping bills go down as you buy ingredients rather than processed foods, AND you just buy what you need.