How AI meal planning can help you prepare healthy food with minimal fuss

You’ve got the ingredients but what to prepare for you or your family? Free AI meal planning generators and apps can help get recipes

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You can give photos of the food in your fridge or cupboards to AI tools and get them to develop meal plans based on what you have on hand. Photo: Shutterstock

Published: 7:15pm, 7 Apr 2025

For anybody who has struggled to pull together a grocery list or plan a week of family meals, the promise of assistance from artificial intelligence is downright appetising.

AI can make dull, time-consuming tasks a breeze, and nutrition experts who understand the emerging technology are enthusiastic. But they season their enthusiasm with more than a dash of caution.

“These tools are really good at giving you what you ask for, as long as you know what you’re asking for,” said Raul Palacios, director of the Didactic Programme in Dietetics at Texas Tech University in the United States.

Palacios is a registered dietitian nutritionist who teaches about AI and regularly uses AI interfaces, called chatbots, for all kinds of tasks. Professionally, AI has streamlined his work with meal plans.

At home, he has taken pictures of what is in his pantry and refrigerator, uploaded them and asked, “Based on the ingredients I have on hand right now, what can I make for a family of four?”

You could also say something like, “I’m trying to reduce the amount of salt in my diet. What are some substitutions that I can make to reduce the amount of salt?” Palacios said that in such a situation, “these tools are pretty good about identifying that if we add some more herbs and spices, as opposed to salt products, that might be helpful”.