Chef

Chef is your AI kitchen companion, built into Magic Meal Kit wherever you browse. Ask it for weeknight ideas, swap an ingredient on a recipe you've already saved, build a meal plan from your library, or kick off a grocery list for your next Meal Kit, all in plain language.

Chef is free for everyone and available on iPhone, iPad, Android, Mac, and the web.

Start a conversation

Tap Ask Chef (see where to find it) and either tap one of the suggested prompts to start, or type your own message in the composer at the bottom and tap the send arrow.

The suggested prompts match what you're viewing. Opened from a screen without its own starters, like Search or Profile in the sidebar, Chef offers a few general jumping-off points:

• Suggest three easy weeknight dinners
• Build a meal plan from what I already have saved
• What can I make with what I have?
• Create a grocery list for my next meal kit

Chef sticks to food: recipes, cooking, drinks, nutrition basics, kitchen gear, groceries, and questions about Magic Meal Kit itself. Ask it about anything else and it will politely point you back to the kitchen.

Cook with what you have

Tell Chef what's in your fridge and pantry, like "chicken thighs, rice, and spinach", and it first checks your saved recipes for ones that use them. If nothing fits, or you want something new, it suggests a few recipe ideas built from those ingredients plus basic staples. Pick one and Chef saves it to your recipes.

Questions the recipe card can't answer

For recipes you imported from a web page, Chef can go back and read the original page. That covers the things a recipe card leaves out: what size pan the author used, whether you can swap buttermilk for yogurt, how long the leftovers keep, or why a step matters. Just ask, and it will pull up the source page if the saved recipe doesn't have the answer.

This only works for recipes imported from a link. Recipes you typed in by hand, imported from a photo, or pulled from a video usually have no source page to read, and Chef will tell you so.

Ask about what you're looking at

On phones and in narrow browser windows, an Ask Chef button sits just above the tabs while you browse your recipes, a recipe, your collections, a collection, your Meal Kits, or a single Meal Kit. Tap it to open Chef on top of what you're viewing, already aware of it. Ask "what can I substitute here?" on a recipe or "which of these is quickest?" on a Meal Kit without naming it first.

Chef remembers the conversation for each thing you open it from. Close it and come back to the same recipe or Meal Kit, and you pick up where you left off, even if Chef was still replying. Tapping a recipe or Meal Kit card in the reply closes the chat and takes you there.

On the web and on tablets, where the tabs become a sidebar, the Ask Chef button sits just below Profile. Click it to open Chef in a panel beside whatever you're viewing, and click it again (or the ×) to close it. The panel stays open as you move around, so clicking a recipe or Meal Kit card in a reply opens it right next to the conversation, and Chef always knows which screen you're on now. The panel keeps one conversation across screens, so closing and reopening it picks up where you left off.

Browsing your recipes

Opened from your recipes, Chef starts with ideas for your whole library, like What can I make tonight in under 30 minutes?, Which of my recipes are highest in protein?, and Find me a new recipe to try this week, which searches the Magic Meal Kit recipe collection and the web and imports the one you pick. Tap What can I make with what I have? to cook with what you have.

Cooking with a recipe

Opened from a recipe, Chef already has the whole recipe in front of it, plus the web page it was imported from, so answers come back quickly while you cook. The chat opens with starters like I'm missing an ingredient and How long do leftovers keep?, plus one built from your dietary preferences if you've set any. Or ask your own:

• Can I make this gluten-free?
• How do I make this in an Instant Pot?
• I want to double the protein.

Chef answers in the chat first. If you want the recipe itself changed, ask, and Chef describes the edit (what's swapped, added, or removed, and which steps change) and waits for your go-ahead. Once it saves the change, it re-estimates the nutrition from the new ingredients and tells you the new numbers. Chef saves the change as a variation so the original stays as it was; ask it to change the original itself if that's what you want.

Organizing your collections

Opened from your collections, Chef offers to Organize my recipes into collections, which files your uncollected recipes the same way the Organize with Chef button does, or to Suggest new collections for my recipes based on what you've saved. It can also add or remove recipes from a collection when you ask.

Opened from a single collection, the starters are about that collection: Pick something from this collection for tonight, Which of my other recipes belong in this collection?, Find new recipes that fit this collection, and Build a meal kit from this collection.

Planning with Meal Kits

Opened from your Meal Kits, Chef offers to Build a meal kit for next week or Build a meal plan for next week from the recipes you've saved. For a guided version, tap + on the Meal Kits tab to plan your week with Chef.

Opened from a single Meal Kit, the starters are about that kit: How does this meal kit fit my nutrition goals? compares it with your daily nutrition goals, Check off groceries I probably already have ticks off staples on its grocery list so they stay out of your cart, Fill the open meals in my meal plan schedules recipes into empty slots, and Swap one of these recipes for something new trades a recipe out.

Attach an image

Tap the picture icon in the composer to attach a photo or screenshot. A thumbnail appears next to your draft so you can confirm the right image is attached, or tap the small × to remove it. When you send a message with an image, Chef can read it directly: take a photo of a printed recipe card, screenshot a recipe from another app, or share a picture of what's in your fridge and ask for ideas. As with any other action, Chef summarizes what it sees and asks you to confirm before saving anything to your library.

While Chef is responding

While a response is streaming, the send arrow turns into a stop button. Tap it to halt the current response cleanly. The conversation stays put — you can follow up with a new message or regenerate the answer.

Regenerate the last response

If Chef's reply isn't quite right, tap Regenerate beneath the most recent response to ask the model to try again. Chef uses the same prompt (and any attached image) and produces a fresh answer, replacing the previous one.

What it can do

Chef has access to your Magic Meal Kit account and can:

• Browse and search your recipes, Meal Kits, and collections.
• Suggest recipes that use the ingredients you have on hand, that are quick, or that match your preferences, and save a new one when you pick it.
• Search the Magic Meal Kit recipe collection and the open web for recipes you don't yet have, with a short list of candidates and links to the source so you can pick one to import.
• Import a recipe from a URL, suggest substitutions, or rewrite a recipe in a different style.
• Edit a recipe's ingredients and steps, then re-estimate its nutrition.
• Build a new Meal Kit, add or remove recipes from a Meal Kit, and adjust per-recipe servings.
• Manage a Meal Kit's meal plan: schedule recipes into day and meal slots, adjust per-slot servings, and mark a meal as skip, takeout, or leftovers.
• Generate a combined shopping list for a Meal Kit, and check off items you already have.
• Read your daily nutrition goals, and read or update your dietary preferences, allergies, and disliked foods, plus planning preferences like the day your week starts on.

Before doing anything that changes your library, Chef summarizes what it's about to do and asks you to confirm.

Dietary preferences and allergies

If you've recorded any allergies, a banner at the top of a new Chef conversation reminds you to double-check ingredients against them before cooking. AI suggestions can occasionally miss something. Chef itself is also told about your allergies and diets and is asked to honor them in every suggestion, but the banner is your safety net.

Chef also knows the foods you dislike and steers around them, suggesting a swap when a recipe calls for one. Diets and dislikes don't trigger the banner.

If you change your preferences in Profile → Preferences, Chef picks up the new context on its next message.

Conversations

Chef saves your conversations to your account. Each recipe, collection, and Meal Kit has its own conversation, as do your recipe, collection, and Meal Kit lists. The Ask Chef panel on the web and tablets keeps a single conversation of its own as you move around. Reopening Chef from the same place picks up where you left off, even after you close the app, and on any device you're signed in to.

To start over, tap New chat: the pencil icon at the top right of the Chef window or next to the close button in the Ask Chef panel, then confirm. Your earlier conversation isn't deleted, but there's no way to browse back to it yet.

For something you'll want to come back to, like a meal plan you're refining, ask Chef to save it as a Meal Kit. That lives in your library permanently.

Outside the app

If you'd rather chat with the assistant of your choice (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Cursor, and others), Magic Meal Kit also exposes a Model Context Protocol server you can connect to from those tools. Chef and the MCP server work against the same data, so changes you make in one show up in the other.

Need help?

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