The Sunday evening question in a British household has not really changed in fifty years. Someone stands in front of the fridge, opens the door, closes it, opens the freezer, closes that too, and eventually says out loud what everyone was already thinking. What are we going to eat this week.
The apps below are the ones that answer that question honestly for a UK family. Not the ones that promise to answer it and then hand you a Californian recipe with cup measurements and an ingredient you cannot pronounce. The ones that work with Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda, or Morrisons, that hold up on both iPhone and Android, and that survive past week one.
Each entry below carries the current price, the thing it does well, and the thing it does not do. Every price is verified against the app’s current UK listing or App Store page.
| App | Best For | Price In UK |
| Cherrypick | UK supermarket integration | Free |
| Mealime | Busy couples wanting 30-minute meals | £2.99/month |
| AnyList | Real-time shared family shopping lists | Free tier; £11 to £14/year premium |
| Paprika Recipe Manager 3 | Building your own recipe library | £4-£25 one-time per platform |
| Plan to Eat | Households where more than one person cooks | Subscription (~£5/month) |
| Kitche | Reducing food waste | Free |
| eMeals | Pre-built weekly menus | Subscription |
| Samsung Food | Free option with cross-device sync | Free |
Now the details, and honestly, some of these are much stronger picks than others.
Cherrypick
If a UK family is asking me which meal planning app to start with, this is almost always the answer.
Cherrypick is a London-founded app (originally Lollipop, rebranded in 2024) with over 200,000 UK users and around 800 recipes, and its central trick is proper supermarket integration. You pick your recipes for the week. The app builds your shopping list. Then, and this is the bit that matters, it drops the whole thing straight into your Tesco, Sainsbury’s, or Asda basket ready for checkout.
No copying and pasting. No opening a second app. No “did I remember to add the onions.”
The app is free to use, which is unusual for something this well-integrated. It also partners with BBC Good Food for recipe content. One user reported saving £500 on their food shop in a year, which likely reflects what the app is really designed around: stopping the household from repeat-buying ingredients they already have.
The catches worth knowing: no full offline mode, no Morrisons coverage on the automated basket yet, and no support for Aldi or Lidl (both of those supermarkets refuse to open the delivery APIs the app would need).
Mealime
Mealime has been around since 2016 and has passed 5 million users globally. The whole philosophy is speed. Most of the recipes cook in about 30 minutes, and each one comes with step-by-step photos rather than the wall of blog text that most recipe sites now insist on delivering before they let you get to the ingredients list.
At £2.99 a month on the UK App Store (verified from the actual iOS listing), it is one of the more reasonably priced subscriptions in the category. A generous free tier is available too. Preferences can be set for vegetarian, low-carb, keto, vegan, and other dietary directions, and the quality of the recipes does not drop between them.
The audience it suits: busy professional couples and small families who want home-cooked food most weeknights without the energy for planning it from scratch every Sunday. The audience it does not suit: large households with wildly different tastes, because the personalisation goes down to preferences and dietary needs but not to a “our seven-year-old will not eat anything green” level.
The shopping list feature organises items by grocery store aisle, which is a small kindness that most competing apps do not bother with.
AnyList
Two or three people all involved in the weekly shop? This is the one that changes daily life properly.
The core feature is real-time shared shopping lists. One person adds tomatoes to the list at home. The other person is at the supermarket and sees tomatoes appear on their screen. Once the tomatoes go into the trolley and get ticked off, they vanish from everyone else’s list too. Sounds like a small thing until you have lived without it, at which point you realise you have wasted years texting your partner asking whether we already have milk.
Pricing sits at free for basic lists, and AnyList Complete is $9.99 a year for an individual account or $14.99 a year for a family account (roughly £8 and £11 respectively). One of the better value-for-money offers in the whole app market. Recipe import from any website works well, and the meal planner side pulls its weight.
Where it falls down: the user interface, which several reviewers describe as slightly clunky, and the recipe discovery side, which barely exists. Bring your own recipes and it works brilliantly. Expect it to inspire your Wednesday night dinner and it will disappoint.
Featured in The New York Times, Good Housekeeping, and picked by Apple as one of 10 Essential Apps. Which tells you the industry consensus is roughly where mine is.
Paprika Recipe Manager 3
Paprika is not a subscription. This is the entire point of it.
Buy it once for the platform you want (£4-£5 for mobile, around £25 for desktop) and it is yours forever, no monthly fee, no data harvesting, no “we have updated our terms” emails. In an app category that has largely gone subscription-only, Paprika holding the line on one-time pricing is a small act of dignity that its 4.9-star iOS rating from over 30,000 reviews suggests users notice.
What it does is beautifully organised recipe management. You clip recipes from anywhere on the web using the built-in browser, and Paprika strips out the ads, the family life story, and the two-thousand-word essay about the writer’s Italian nonna, leaving you with the ingredients and the method. Servings scale automatically. Shopping lists sort themselves by aisle. Everything works offline.
The trade-off: no recipe suggestions, no social sharing, no AI features. It is essentially a very good digital recipe box with a competent meal planner welded to the side.
For a certain type of user, that is exactly the appeal. If you already know what you want to cook, and you have collected recipes from your mum, from cookbooks, from various food blogs over ten years, and you want somewhere to organise them properly, Paprika is what you are looking for. If you want the app to solve the “what are we eating” question, look elsewhere.
Plan to Eat
Plan to Eat sits in the middle ground between AnyList and Paprika.
It gives you the collaborative real-time family features that AnyList does, but with a proper calendar-based meal planner as the central interface. You import recipes from any site, drag them onto a weekly calendar, and the app generates the shopping list from what you have planned. Multiple family members can view and edit the same plan.
Subscription price sits at around £5 a month or £39 a year, more expensive than AnyList but doing more with the meal planning side.
Best suited to households where cooking is properly shared between two or more adults, particularly the sort of household where one person plans the week on Sunday and the other person actually does the shop on Wednesday. Less suited to households where one person is doing all of it, because the collaborative features become wasted overhead if nobody else is using them.
Reliable, competent, well-supported, slightly overpriced for a solo user, excellent for a shared household.
Kitche
Kitche is the app that decided to solve a different problem entirely, and the choice paid off.
Rather than asking “what are you cooking this week,” Kitche asks “what have you already got that is about to go off.” The whole interface is built around inventory management and food waste reduction. You scan your receipts or add items manually as you shop, and Kitche tracks what is in your fridge, what is expiring when, and prompts you to use things before they die a slow death in the bottom drawer.
The app is completely free, which given the engineering behind the receipt scanning is impressive on its own terms.
For UK families who feel guilty about food waste, and most of us do, this is the app that does something about it. The average UK household throws away £730 of food a year according to WRAP data. Kitche is essentially trying to give some of that money back.
The limitation: this is not really a meal planning app on its own. It tells you what needs using up but does not plan meals around that inventory. Pair it with Cherrypick or Mealime and the combination becomes powerful. Use it alone and it can feel slightly frustrating.
eMeals
eMeals has been around longer than most of the apps on this list and holds a strong reputation in the US family space. The mechanics are different from the others.
Rather than building your own meal plan, you pick a menu style (Classic Family, Low Carb, Slow Cooker, Vegetarian, and so on), and eMeals sends you a new pre-built seven-day plan every week, complete with a shopping list. You plan nothing yourself. The plan arrives, you cook it, you move on.
The subscription is priced in dollars but works fine internationally. Recipes lean American. Shopping lists assume generic categories rather than UK supermarket layouts.
The fit: families who want the “what are we eating” question taken away completely, and who are not fussy about the American slant of the recipes. The mismatch: anyone who wants control over their weekly plan, or who wants recipes designed with British ingredients and portion sizes in mind.
Samsung Food
The free option. And a proper one.
Samsung Food (formerly Whisk, rebranded after Samsung’s acquisition) offers meal planning, recipe saving, and a basic shopping list feature at no cost. Works across iOS, Android, and web. Recipe import from any site works decently. The meal planner is basic but functional.
What it does well: gives users a place to try meal planning without committing to a subscription, or serves households where the requirements are properly simple. It integrates with Samsung Smart Refrigerators (if you happen to own one), which is a nice touch if the technology is in your kitchen, and irrelevant if it is not.
What it does less well: depth. Recipe suggestions are less curated than Cherrypick’s or Mealime’s, the shopping list features are less sophisticated than AnyList’s, and there is no supermarket integration. Competent at everything, best at nothing.
For the household that just wants a free app to try before deciding whether to pay for something better, it is a sensible starting point.
Which One Suits Your Household
Look at these eight apps together, and a rough map appears:
- Shopping mainly at Tesco, Sainsbury’s, or Asda: Cherrypick, every time. The supermarket integration is worth more than any other feature.
- Wanting speed and simplicity above everything: Mealime for £2.99 a month.
- Sharing the cooking across two or more adults: AnyList for real-time list sharing, Plan to Eat for shared planning.
- Already sitting on a personal recipe library: Paprika, one-time purchase, forever yours.
- Bothered by food waste: Kitche, free, alongside another planning app.
- Wanting the week planned for you: eMeals, at the cost of some UK relevance.
- Just testing before you commit: Samsung Food, or the free tiers of any of the above.
The honest reality is that most UK families end up using two apps rather than one. The Cherrypick and Kitche combination is a properly powerful setup. The Paprika and AnyList combination is what committed home cooks tend to land on. The Mealime and Samsung Food pairing works if speed matters more than depth.
Whichever combination fits your household, the goal stays the same. The Sunday evening fridge-open, fridge-close, fridge-open ritual becomes something less painful. And after a few months of using any of these properly, the “what are we eating this week” question mostly answers itself before it needs asking.
Which is the whole point of it.