Boxes (Meal Kits)

A Box (Meal Kit) is a group of recipes you want to cook together: a week of dinners, a meal-prep Sunday, a dinner party, anything. Magic Meal Kit combines the ingredients across every recipe in the Box into one shopping list, then you can send it to Instacart or Apple Reminders.

Free accounts get one Box. Pro removes the limit.

Create a Box

On the Boxes tab, tap +. Give it a name, pick the recipes you want in it, and save. You can also start an empty Box and add recipes later.

Add or remove recipes

From a Box's detail screen, tap Add Recipes. The picker is sorted by ingredient overlap: recipes that share the most ingredients with what's already in the Box appear first. Each recipe shows how many of its ingredients are already in the Box out of its total, with the matching ingredients listed, so the overlap is obvious. This makes it easy to build a Box around a few staples (celery, carrots, onions) and have it suggest recipes that reuse them.

To remove a recipe, tap − on its servings stepper until servings reach 0. The recipe drops out of the Box and the shopping list updates.

Scale per recipe

Each recipe in a Box has its own servings stepper. Tap + or − to cook 2 servings of one recipe and 6 of another in the same Box. The combined shopping list recomputes after a brief pause and per-serving nutrition stays accurate. The choice is remembered for next time.

Meal-plan mode

The calendar toggle in a Box's header switches it into meal-plan mode. The recipe list is replaced by a 7-day grid, one row per day in your week-start order (set under Preferences). Each day row scrolls horizontally through its meal slots: breakfast, lunch, dinner, plus any extras.

A slot can hold:

• A recipe card, the same card as the normal list. Tap it to open the recipe.
• A marker for a meal you're not cooking: Takeout, Leftovers, or Skip.
• An empty placeholder. Tap the trailing + on a day to add another meal slot.

Filling and clearing slots

Tap an empty placeholder to open a menu: Add recipe, Takeout, Leftovers, or Skip. Add recipe opens your recipe list and drops the one you pick into that slot. The same recipe can sit in more than one slot, so you can plan it for several meals.

You can also start from a recipe: adding one to a meal-plan Box (from the recipe's Add to Box or the Box's Add recipes button) opens a grid where you tap every open day and meal slot you want it in. Only unfilled slots are selectable. Nothing is scheduled until you tap the checkmark to save; the recipe lands in each chosen slot at its default servings. Tap the X to cancel.

Each scheduled recipe card has a servings stepper that controls just that one meal. Lower it to 0 to clear the slot back to a placeholder; clearing a recipe's last slot removes it from the Box entirely. Tap a marker to change it to a different marker, swap it for a recipe, or Clear it back to an empty placeholder.

Long-press a scheduled recipe card (right-click on the web) for quick actions: Swap it for another recipe while keeping the slot's servings, Duplicate it plus its servings into any open slot, or Remove it from the slot.

Your shopping list always adds up the servings across every slot, so it stays correct as you plan.

Turning the toggle on spreads the Box's existing recipes across the open slots; turning it off collapses everything back into the standard recipe list. Either way the combined shopping list stays the same.

Smart ingredient combining

Ingredients are merged across all recipes in the Box, on-device:

• 3 cloves garlic + 2 garlic cloves becomes 5 cloves garlic.
• Quantities convert smartly when it makes sense: garlic cloves roll up into heads, celery stalks roll up into bunches.
• Each ingredient shows which recipes contributed to it.

Pantry items

Tap the checkbox next to any ingredient to mark it as a pantry item: salt, olive oil, spices, anything you already have. Pantry items are excluded from the Instacart cart and Reminders list, so what you send to the store is just what you actually need to buy. Tap again to put it back on the list.

Order or shop

When the list looks right, you have two shopping options:

• Shop with Instacart: tap the Shop Ingredients button to open an Instacart shopping list for one-tap pickup or delivery from your store. On iPhone the button sits in a bar pinned near the bottom of the screen; on the web and larger screens it sits just above the Grocery List.
• Export to Reminders (iOS only): open the Box's actions menu (the ••• button in the top corner) to drop the list into Apple Reminders so you can check items off in-store.

For details on each, see Grocery shopping.

Duplicate or archive

From a Box's more menu (•••):

• Duplicate: copy the Box (recipes, servings, and pantry flags) under a new name. Use this to reuse a lineup with tweaks.
• Archive: hide the Box without deleting it. Toggle Show archived in the Boxes filter menu to find archived Boxes and unarchive them.

From the Boxes list you can also long-press a Box (iPhone/Android) or right-click it (web) for quick Share and Archive actions without opening it. A normal tap still opens the Box.

Need help?

Email support@magicmealkit.com and we'll get back to you.