A pantry meal planner that starts with the food you already have

Most planners start from a recipe catalogue and work forwards. You choose, the app totals up the ingredients, and the list it produces assumes your kitchen is empty. It is a shopping app with a calendar attached.

PrepWise runs the other direction. Your pantry is what every recipe gets measured against, so a recipe is green when you can cook it right now and tells you which two things are short when you cannot. Plan a meal and it reserves what that meal needs.

That last part is what makes a week survive contact with Tuesday. Thursday's traybake cannot quietly claim the chicken thighs Tuesday already spent, so a plan that looks fine on paper is one you can actually cook. A plain list of seven recipes has no way to know it counted the same chicken twice.

The method is the same one that works on paper, which is worth knowing before you decide an app is the answer. It runs in this order, and the order is the whole thing:

1. Take stock of what is there, with rough quantities
2. Push anything fresh, opened, or near its date to the top
3. Pick two anchors, ingredients you have a lot of that several meals can hang off
4. Fill the week in clock order, short-lived food first
5. Write the shopping list last, from whatever the plan is still missing

Once you can see everything you own, the useful ordering is time, not food group. Opened dairy, fresh herbs, and a bag of salad are on a short clock. Root vegetables and eggs have longer. Tins barely have one.

Put the short-clock food into Monday and Tuesday and the long-clock food later, and most household waste stops happening on its own, because the food goes into a meal before it goes off. No one has to track a percentage for that to work.

Two anchors is the number that makes the rest cheap. Chicken thighs and a bag of rice cover a traybake, a fried rice, and a soup, and the three share one shop instead of needing three. One anchor and you eat the same dinner four nights running. Three and you are back to a shopping list. The five-step method goes through this properly, including how to do the first stock-take without losing an afternoon.

Because the plan already knows what you own, the list writes itself by subtraction: everything the week needs, minus everything the kitchen already holds. It is normally much shorter than people expect, and that is the point rather than a side effect.

It also kills the duplicate buy, which is the most expensive habit in a kitchen. Nobody buys a third jar of cumin deliberately. They buy it because the list came from recipes and the cupboard was never consulted. More on how that list is built on the shopping list page.

Every pantry-first system dies the same way. The first stock-take goes fine, nobody updates it, and two weeks later the list is fiction. A plan built on a list you have stopped believing is worse than no plan.

So getting food in has to cost almost nothing. Photograph a grocery receipt and the shelf updates from it. Add things by hand in a few seconds. Quantities can be rough, because "most of a bag of rice" is a useful entry and "rice" is not. After that the maintenance is only the moment food moves: in from a shop, out into a meal you cooked. The pantry tracker page covers the inventory side in more detail.

You notice quickly when it drifts, too, because the recipes go wrong with it. That is the one advantage a planner has over a notebook: the list has a job, so being wrong is visible.

PrepWise is free to download, and planning is not the part behind the paywall. The free tier holds 15 saved recipes and 20 assistant messages a day.

Pro is $6.99 a month or $39.99 a year, with a 7-day trial. iPhone only, iOS 15.1 or later. If you want the macro side of the week as well, that is on the macro meal planner page.

If you cook the same five meals on rotation and you are happy about it, you already have a plan and a stable list. Nothing here improves on that.

If you shop daily for that evening, this trades a little admin for fewer trips, and you would be giving up the trips you like to save something you do not want.

It also needs a kitchen you control. In a shared house where food arrives and disappears without a rule, the stock-take is unreliable, and an unreliable stock-take makes the plan worse rather than better.

And it is iPhone only. There is no Android build.