Meals
Meal plan
What it's about
The meal plan is your week at a glance: what's coming to the table when – breakfast, snack, lunch and dinner, seven days. On mobile, as a chronological daily list; on desktop, as a proper weekly table with four columns. You can push the ingredients from any planned recipe onto the shopping list with one click.
Why it's here
“What are we cooking tomorrow?” is a question that seems to come up five times a day in families. If you don't write it down, you forget to defrost the chicken breast and stand in front of the fridge at 18:00 with no idea what to do. With a shared plan, everyone knows what's coming – and whoever's shopping knows the ingredients. patchio connects the plan and the shop, so the week's planning turns straight into the list for Aldi and REWE.
How it works
Week navigation: at the top, ‹ / › arrows take you to the weeks before and after, with a “Today” button between them that brings you back to the current week. The week title shows the date range (e.g. “25–31 May 2026”).
Four meal slots: Breakfast → Snack → Lunch → Dinner. Snack is meant as the day's second slot (typically a mid-morning snack or packed lunch break), but you can just as well use it for an afternoon snack – the order only sets the sorting, not the time of day.
On mobile, you see the seven days stacked. Every day has a “+ Meal” button – tapping it opens the dialogue with the date pre-filled; you choose the slot inside the dialogue.
On desktop, the week is a proper table: the days of the week with their dates on the left, the four slot columns with emoji across the top. Clicking an empty cell opens the dialogue with the date and slot already pre-selected – you just need to type in the recipe (or the free text).
For each entry, you either choose an existing recipe from your library (with auto-suggest as you type), or you enter free text if you can't be bothered adding a recipe (“Pizza”, “Leftovers”). You can turn free text into a full recipe later – the sparkles button in the dialogue carries the name straight over into recipe creation.
Shopping list: a small trolley icon sits next to every plan entry with a recipe. Clicking it pushes the ingredients onto a shopping list of your choice (Aldi, say). The items get tagged with the source “from meal plan week XX, recipe name” – so later on, you can still see why you're buying 400 g of mince.
Copy week: many families repeat themselves. The “Copy week” button (on the right of the navigation) opens a dialogue: the source week is always the current one, and you choose the target week with a quick chip (“Next week”, “In 2 weeks” …) or a date picker. All entries are copied 1:1 into the target week; existing entries in the target week stay and are added to. In the target week, you can then adjust anything that needs to be different.
How many am I cooking for? If you use the parenting schedule, every day shows who's likely to be eating – as person avatars with first names (photo or initial on that person's colour). The adults who live at home full-time are always included as the base; children are added according to the parenting schedule for that day. So you can see at a glance how many servings you're planning for.
In practice
On Sunday, you plan a standard school week: muesli and bread for breakfast, apple + cheese cubes as a snack, chicken curry / spaghetti / pizza for lunch, dinner left open. Everything's in the table within ten minutes. With “Copy week”, you carry the breakfast and snack entries straight into the next three weeks – those rarely change anyway. For lunch, you push the curry ingredients onto the ALDI shopping list; the pizza is from the freezer, and you already have spaghetti at home. The rest of the household sees what's coming up as they walk past – and nobody asks what's for dinner at 18:00 any more.