Mind the Gap 🚇

Here’s a simple goal: plan a week of meals that hit your protein target, then order the ingredients from Tesco.

It should take a few minutes. Instead, it takes three different apps and a lot of patience. For UK shoppers, it’s even worse since most apps aren’t built for UK supermarkets.

No app does this well. There’s a gap in the market.

When Two Worlds Don’t Collide 🌍

The app market has split into two camps: meal planning apps and nutrition tracking apps. Each does its job really well but in isolation, and neither bridges the gap.

Meal planning apps like Mealime, Mealia, and Recime excel at organising recipes and generating shopping lists. Mealime offers nutrition data for its own recipes but locks it behind a subscription, custom recipes get no nutrition data and its primary integrations are US supermarkets.

Mealia integrates with UK supermarkets but does not offer nutrition data, although there is a workaround to get nutrition data through their AI chat feature. Recime lets users import recipes from any URL, even Instagram, but ingredient input is plain text, and there’s no recipe library to browse, users must hunt for recipes.

Nutrition apps like Cronometer offer thorough tracking with data from proper sources like NCCDB and USDA. Recipes and meal plans are supported. But the interface is cluttered with food logging, sleep tracking, weight, fasting. Meal planning feels complex. No supermarket integration either.

Apps focus on planning or tracking, but rarely both. And for UK shoppers specifically, supermarket integration remains underdeveloped.

Utopia: A Meal Planning Dream 🏝️

Picture this workflow:

Browse with Full Nutrition

You open an app and browse a library of recipes, each with complete nutrition facts calculated automatically. Nothing locked, nothing missing. You find a high protein chicken stir-fry that fits your macros and add it to your meal plan.

Create Your Own Recipes

But you also want to add your grandmother’s lamb tagine recipe. So you create it from scratch, selecting ingredients from a database of thousands, each with full nutrition data. As you add 300g of lamb shoulder, the recipe’s protein count updates instantly. No manual entry, no guessing.

Build Your Week

Now you build a weekly meal plan. You add the stir-fry for Monday (2 servings), the tagine for Wednesday (4 servings for batch cooking), and a few other recipes. The app shows your macro totals. Too little protein? Swap in a different recipe and watch the numbers adjust.

Generate Your Shopping List

When you’re happy with the plan, you tap once and get a complete shopping list, every ingredient, every quantity, aggregated and ready.

Realise you also need milk, bananas, and coffee? Add them directly to your basket from real supermarket products with real prices.

One Tap Order

Then the final step: tap once more, and the order goes to your supermarket for delivery or click-and-collect.

Planning. Nutrition. Shopping. One flow.

That’s what meal planning should feel like.

The final Carroty 🥕

That workflow isn’t a fantasy. Most of it exists today.

Carroty is a meal planning app built for UK shoppers who care about nutrition. Currently, it can’t do everything described above, but it attempts to close the gap.

Current Menu

  • Real products from UK supermarkets like Tesco and Morrisons, with nutrition data
  • Recipe library with nutrition data for each ingredient
  • Nutrition calculation for any recipe, including created recipes
  • Macro tracking across entire meal plans
  • Shopping list generation from meal plan
  • Search by meaning: find products by intent (“ravioli with spinach”) rather than exact names across all integrated supermarkets

Future Menu

The aim is simple: Plan by nutrition. Shop in seconds.

Carroty is now available on the App Store →