Meal Kits

A 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 Meal Kit into one shopping list, then you can send it to Instacart or Apple Reminders.

Meal Kits are free and unlimited on every account.

One Meal Kit per week

The Meal Kits tab opens on This week. Swipe, or tap the week on either side of the current one, to move between weeks: back through past weeks that have a Meal Kit, and forward up to four weeks to plan ahead. This week is always highlighted; tap the week in the middle to jump back to it.

Each week holds one Meal Kit. A week without one offers two ways to fill it: Create with Chef or Build it myself.

Plan your week with Chef

On an empty week, tap Create with Chef and answer three quick steps. Chef then builds that week's meal plan for you in about a minute:

Choose how many people you're cooking for, which days (days already past start unchecked), and which meals: breakfast, lunch, dinner, or any mix.
Pick a level for three priorities:
- Variety: Consistent repeats dinners meal-prep style, Balanced avoids repeat dinners this week, and Explore brings in new dishes and skips anything from the two weeks around it. At every level, Chef avoids dinners from the weeks right before and after. Breakfasts and lunches always stick to a few simple recipes that repeat, and Chef keeps the shopping list short by picking dinners that share ingredients.
- Effort: Simple keeps every dinner under 30 minutes, Balanced under an hour (or hands-off slow cooks), and Feast has no limit and adds one project dinner.
- Budget: Cheapest favors a few affordable ingredients, Balanced skips seafood, shellfish, and steak, and Treat yo self has no limits.
Add any notes, like "tacos Tuesday and pancakes for Sunday brunch". This step also shows the diets, allergies, and disliked foods Chef will follow, with a shortcut to edit them.

Once Chef is done, a Pantry Check lists the staples your recipes assume you have, like salt, olive oil, and spices. Check off the ones already in your kitchen and they won't show up in Items to buy. Tap Go to meal kit to open your plan.

Eating out or skipping a meal? Once your meal kit loads, remove that meal or mark it as skipped right from the meal plan.

Chef picks from your recipes and the Magic Meal Kit recipe collection, always honoring your diets, allergies, and disliked foods. If your notes ask for a dish neither has, like "tacos on Tuesday", Chef looks for one on the web. The finished Meal Kit's meal plan shows only the days and meals you planned. If Chef couldn't fill every meal, a note on the plan says how many are still open.

Your people, meals, and priority choices are remembered for next time. Change them any time under Profile → Preferences → Meal Kits.

Create a Meal Kit yourself

On an empty week, tap Build it myself to start an empty Meal Kit for that week, then add recipes to it.

Add or remove recipes

From a Meal Kit's detail screen, tap the Add Recipes card at the end of the recipe list. The picker is sorted by ingredient overlap: recipes that share the most ingredients with what's already in the Meal Kit appear first. Each recipe shows how many of its ingredients are already in the Meal Kit out of its total, with the matching ingredients listed, so the overlap is obvious. This makes it easy to build a Meal Kit 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 Meal Kit and the shopping list updates.

Scale per recipe

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

Meal plan view

The calendar toggle beside a Meal Kit's Recipes title switches every Meal Kit between the recipe list and the meal plan. Both show the same Meal Kit, so switching never changes your servings or shopping list. Meal Kits open in the list unless you turn on Meal Planner under Profile → Preferences. On wide screens, the recipe list or meal plan and grocery list scroll independently.

The meal plan is 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.

Recipes you haven't placed in a meal yet sit in a TBD row above the week. Long-press one (right-click on the web) to Schedule it into a meal or Remove it.

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.

Recipes added from a recipe's Add to Meal Kit or the Meal Kit's Add recipes button start in the TBD row.

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. In the recipe list, a recipe's stepper changes its first meal in the plan. 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 meal and the TBD row, so it stays correct as you plan. Either way the combined shopping list stays the same.

Smart ingredient combining

Ingredients are merged across all recipes in the Meal Kit, 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 Meal Kit'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.

Edit, duplicate, or archive

From a Meal Kit's more menu (•••):

Edit Meal Kit: change how many people you're cooking for and which days and meals the plan covers. Changing people scales every planned meal's servings. New days and meals start empty, and meals on days or meals you turn off are removed after you confirm.
Duplicate: copy the Meal Kit (recipes, servings, and pantry flags) into the next week without one. Use this to reuse a lineup with tweaks.
Archive: hide the Meal Kit without deleting it, which frees its week for a new one. If you unarchive a Meal Kit whose week has a new one by then, it moves to the next free week.

Need help?

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

Ready to get cooking?