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

If you opened Mealime this week and found it gone, this is the short version: the app shut down on October 21, 2026. Albertsons Companies, which acquired Mealime in 2021, folded it into Meals Hub, a recipe and shopping feature inside its own grocery apps: Albertsons, Safeway, Vons, and Jewel-Osco.

As a farewell, Pro was made free for everyone in its final weeks, and Pro subscriptions did not renew. That part was handled decently.

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

There was no export button

Mealime never built one. There was no file, no archive, and no download that handed you your saved recipes, your meal plans, or your grocery lists. The only way to keep them was to copy them out by hand before the shutdown.

It also means you should be skeptical of any app 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.

Rebuilding without your old data, in about fifteen minutes

• The recipes you actually cook. Not everything you ever saved. If you copied or screenshotted favorites before the 21st, start there. If not, write down the ten or fifteen dinners your household genuinely rotates through. Most of them you already know by heart.
• Your dietary settings. Write down every diet, allergy, and excluded ingredient your household works around. This is the part that took longest to get right in Mealime, and it is the part you will re-enter somewhere else.
• Your staples. The things you buy every week regardless of the plan. A good planner will work around them.

In practice most people find the real list is shorter than they feared. The worry 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.

On getting your data back out, there is an Export button in Settings. One tap downloads everything you have here as a file: your household, everyone's diets, every week you have planned with its recipes, your saved recipes, your pantry and your ratings. It is free on every plan, including the free one. Permanent account deletion sits in the same place.

Ask the same question of whoever you land with. An app that will not hand your data back while it is healthy is not going to start when it is shutting down.

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.