Meal plan calendar sync
Every planned dinner lands on your Google Calendar as its own event, with the recipe name on it. Swap Wednesday's meal and Wednesday's event changes too. It shows up on your iPhone or in Outlook wherever your Google calendar already does.
Start freeNo credit card · about 2 minutes
Free to start · web, iPhone, and Android · calendar write-back on Home Chef and up
Each night of the plan gets a single event named for the meal, so a glance at your phone at 4pm tells you it is chicken shawarma bowls tonight and there is no need to stop for groceries.
Events start at 6:00 PM by default and block the recipe's cook time plus 30 minutes to eat. A 25 minute stir-fry holds less of your evening than a Sunday braise, and the calendar shows it.
Dinners are colored by day of the week, so they read as their own layer and stay easy to tell apart from your meetings.
A calendar meal plan is only useful if it is still true on Thursday.
Plans change. Someone vetoes the fish, a friend invites you out, you regenerate the week because nothing on it sounded good. Eat Roostly keeps your calendar in step with the plan:
That night's event is replaced with the new dinner. You never end up with two events stacked on Tuesday.
Every event is replaced with the new plan, and the old ones are removed.
Remove from calendar clears the dinner events in one go.
No credit card · about 2 minutes
Each household member connects their own Google account, and the dinners land on each person's own calendar. Your partner sees what is for dinner on their phone without a shared calendar to set up or a text to send. Nobody can push events onto someone else's calendar, so each person turns it on for themselves.
To be straight about it: Google Calendar is the integration. There is no direct Apple Calendar or Outlook connection and no iCal feed. Because the dinners are written to your Google calendar, though, they appear anywhere that calendar already shows.
In your iPhone's Settings, open Calendar, find Accounts, and add your Google account with Calendars switched on. The menu names shift a little between iOS versions. Once it is added, the dinners appear in the Calendar app next to everything else.
Add your Google account under Accounts in the Calendar app's settings.
Add your Google account to Outlook, or show your Google calendar there the way you already do for work. The dinner events come along with it.
You can do this without us. Make a separate "Dinners" calendar in Google Calendar so meals do not clutter your main one. Add an event per night with the meal name, and paste the recipe link into the description. Some people set a recurring event, like Taco Tuesday every week, and fill in the rest by hand on Sunday.
It works until the first change. Every swap means finding the old event and editing it. The shopping list lives somewhere else and does not know you moved the salmon. Recurring events keep promising tacos on the Tuesday you are out of town. By week three the calendar is describing a plan nobody is following, and people quietly stop updating it.
| Manual calendar meal plan | Eat Roostly | |
|---|---|---|
| Creating events | Typed in one at a time, every week. | Added for the whole week from the plan, timed to each recipe. |
| When a meal changes | Find the event and edit it by hand, or end up with two. | The event is replaced automatically. Never duplicated. |
| Busy nights | Up to you to notice the 7pm practice before you pick the lasagna. | Your calendar is read first, so busy nights get quick dinners and trips get none. |
| Shopping list | Written separately, and out of date after the first swap. | Built from the same plan, aisle-organized for the week. |
| Partner's calendar | Share the Dinners calendar and hope they look. | Each member connects their own Google account and gets the dinners on their own calendar. |
Putting dinners on a calendar is the easy half. The useful half is planning them around what is already there. Eat Roostly looks at each evening before it plans, so the events it writes back already fit your week. That side has its own page: meal planning that reads your Google Calendar first. For the longer argument, see why syncing is not planning, or try the manual method in how to plan dinners around Google Calendar.
Writing dinners to your calendar is part of Home Chef, $6.99 a month or $69.99 a year, along with unlimited plans, recipe import, and sending your list to a Kroger cart. Family Table, $12.99 a month, adds one shared plan for up to 6 people. Reading your calendar to plan is free on every plan, and so is allergy and diet filtering.
Yes. On Home Chef and up, Eat Roostly adds each planned dinner to your Google Calendar as its own event, at 6:00 PM by default, blocking the cook time plus 30 minutes to eat. When the plan changes, the events change with it.
Yes, through your Google account. Eat Roostly writes dinners to Google Calendar, so if your Google account is added to the iPhone Calendar app, the dinners appear there alongside everything else. There is no direct Apple Calendar integration.
No. Eat Roostly does not offer an iCal or .ics feed. It writes events straight to Google Calendar, and any app that already shows your Google calendar, including Apple Calendar and Outlook, will show the dinners.
The event for that night is replaced with the new meal. Regenerating the week does the same for every night. Old events are replaced, never duplicated, and Remove from calendar clears them all.
Writing dinners to your calendar is part of Home Chef, at $6.99 a month or $69.99 a year, and Family Table, at $12.99 a month. Reading your calendar to plan the week is free on every plan, including the free one.