Mealime Is Shutting Down October 21. Where to Go if You Cook Around Dietary Needs

If you opened Mealime this month and found a goodbye notice, this is the short version: the app is being discontinued on October 21, 2026. Albertsons Companies, which acquired Mealime in 2021, is folding it into Meals Hub, a recipe and shopping feature inside its own grocery apps: Albertsons, Safeway, Vons, and Jewel-Osco.

As a farewell, Pro has been made free for everyone through the shutdown, and existing Pro subscriptions will not renew. That part is handled decently.

The part that is not handled at all is your data.

There is no export button

Mealime never built one. There is no file, no archive, and no download that hands you your saved recipes, your meal plans, or your grocery lists. When the app goes, they go with it.

That means anything you want to keep has to come out by hand, before October 21. Not after. A few minutes of copying now is worth more than any amount of asking afterward.

It also means you should be skeptical of any app currently advertising a one-click Mealime import. There is nothing to import from. If they are promising a migration, ask what file they think they are reading.

What to save, in about fifteen minutes

• The recipes you actually cook. Not everything you ever saved. Open your favorites and pull out the ten or fifteen your household genuinely rotates through. Screenshot them, copy the text into a note, or print to PDF.
• Your dietary settings. Write down the diet presets and the excluded ingredients you configured. This is the part that took you longest to get right, and it is the part you will re-enter somewhere else.
• Any grocery list you are mid-week on. Obvious, easy to forget on the 21st.

In practice most people find the real list is shorter than they feared. The panic is about losing years of accumulated setup. The actual recovery is usually an evening.

Choosing a replacement, if your cooking runs on constraints

Plenty of apps will replace Mealime for someone with no restrictions. Almost any recipe app with a shopping list will do the job.

It gets narrower fast if somebody in your house has a food allergy, is eating low-FODMAP, or is watching carbs. Then the thing you are replacing is not really the recipe box. It is the filter. So the questions worth asking a candidate app are specific:

• Can it hold constraints per person, or only per account? A household with two different allergen lists needs both applied at once, to the same dinner. One shared profile quietly fails that.
• Is the filtering free, or is safety a paid feature? Worth checking before you invest a weekend in setup.
• Does it plan the week, or just store recipes? Cross-referencing every candidate meal against every person's list is the weekly tax. An app that only stores recipes hands that tax straight back to you.
• Can you get your data out? You are here because an app shut down without an export. Ask the next one this question first.

Where Eat Roostly fits

Eat Roostly is a weekly meal planner built for exactly that household. You enter each member once, with their own allergies, intolerances, and diet, and every weekly plan is filtered against all of them at once. That filtering is free on every tier, including the free one, and it always will be.

It also reads your calendar before it plans, so the night you have a 7pm game gets a 20 minute dinner instead of a braise, and it can plan around the food already in your pantry. The finished week becomes one aisle-organized shopping list.

We cannot import your Mealime recipes, because nobody can. What we can do is get you from nothing to a full planned week in about two minutes, once your constraints are in. And export and permanent account deletion are built in here from the start, which feels like a more important promise this month than it did last month.

If one specific condition is the reason you are looking at all, these go straight to it: low-FODMAP meal planning, food allergy meal planning, or diabetes-friendly meal planning.