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Paleo Plan is a meal planning service that could save me some time and effort. It provides a weekly meal plan complete with shopping lists and recipes. See this for examples.

While such a service does not provide anything you could not do for yourself, for someone like me it could save some time and effort by getting me organized on Sunday, as opposed to making an emergency trip to the grocer midweek. I don't know how many times I've stood in front of the refrigerator, hungry, and found nothing. Now that there some paleo cookbooks out, or coming out, maybe I can have a little more variety as well. Cookbooks also make weekly planning easier, but you do have to sit down and manually put together a shopping list.

Does anyone use this service or something similar, and what do you think about it? Are there any applications that would allow one to select recipes and automatically generate shopping/ingredient lists?

(I have no affiliation with this site/service whatsoever, and have never been a subscriber.)

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5 Answers

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I looked at one recipe and it didn't look paleo to me. It used canned tomatoes (not exactly paleo), cubes of beef stock (not paleo, too processed), the bison chili (canned tomatoes again). I wouldn't use it. Too much processed foods for as far as I am concerned. Just my opinion.

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 There is nothing wrong with canned tomatoes, I use them all the time. I also can my own all summer long, along with other things I need to preserve. Granted, one does need to read labels, but canned food can be perfectly paleo. I can always tweak a recipe if an ingredient is suspect. My question really was about the meal planning benefits (if any). – Mark Sep 21 2010 at 14:50
It isn't the fact that they are canned but I was under the impression that tomatoes are 1. nightshades and 2. new world. Am I incorrect in my understanding that nightshades are not paleo? – Deb Sep 27 2010 at 13:19
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Well if there are a few things here and there that you object to, like canned tomatoes, then that's something you can work around. And the makers of the website acknowledge this in their FAQs.

But I'd say the biggest problem is that it is a Cordain-inspired paleo site: from the browsing I've done it looks like there is no dairy, and not so much fat, compared to what some of us eat. And that's not something you can really work around, if pretty much every recipe doesn't have enough fat for you. In fact, you might be getting into faileo diet territory if you're not careful ...

That said, I think it could be very helpful for a few people, given certain dietary habits and needs. And the FAQ section reveals the makers of the site to be, apparently at least, reasonable human beings who have their hearts in the right place -- probably not slick, untrustworthy marketers.

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Fat can be added by adding butter, cream, lard, cheese, etc to a lot of things. These would be easy tweaks. I keep most of these around at all times. – Eva Sep 22 2010 at 0:18
Well, yes and no. You can't always just add fat to something; integrating fat into a meal is often what makes it satisfying. Cook a steak in butter and what do you do with the butter? Even if you make sure you have some with every bite, it's not the same as incorporating butter into a sauce. Or cream -- like stroganoff, for example. The trick of integrating fat is the trick of a recipe. Stroganoff is delicious and satisfying because somebody a long time ago figured out that all the ingredients work well together. – Paul Sep 22 2010 at 1:27
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If you have a lot of your own recipes, then maybe a site like www.mealfire.com can be handy. It has the ability to schedule your meals and create shopping lists. Also has an iphone app. Both are free (site does accept donations). I use it all the time since I have a lot of recipes.

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I browsed the site and signed up. It does have some minimally processed foods, tomatoes (which we do use so not a big deal) and egg whites (grrr, one of my pet peaves, I will use the whole egg thank you very much) but overall, for $2.50/week to walk away with a weeks worth of meal plan, recipes, and shopping list that I can modify easily if I desire, each week with variety!?!?! Had to try it! This is always my plan, to sit down on Sunday and do something like this, and with a 1 year old at home and two working parents it just does not happen!

I will report back.

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Hi all. My name is Jason, and I actually run Paleo Plan. I appreciate the feedback and thoughts on our product. To be honest, Ian perfectly described what we're trying to do. As people who followed Paleo ourselves, we spent so much time each week planning and making meal plans and shopping lists, we got tired of it. Yet, hated that moment in front of the fridge with nothing to cook when we didn't plan.

This site was truly built to save people time and energy, so they can focus on what's important: their lives. That's why we eat Paleo to begin with, we want to improve our lives, and the length of it.

And yes, we definitey have some suspect items in a few recipes. We're not chefs, nor did we invent most of these recipes (although, we do try and attribute every recipe we find). So, there are times when a suspect item may have snuck onto the site. We apologize, and remove them/adjust them when we find them. But as Mark said, canned food doesn't have to be non-Paleo.

Anyway, please do let us know any feedback you have, we really are normal people running a website that we've found helps people. Of course we're glad we can get paid for our efforts, but it's just me and my wife, not some soulless corporation--yet :)

Thanks, Jason G.

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