Mealime has shut down: how to recover your recipes and where to go next

Mealime shut down on 21 October 2026, and it never had an export button, so saved recipes, plans and lists went with it. If you did not get yours out in time, most of it is still recoverable: the Mealime catalog recipes live on in Meals Hub, and any link you kept can still be imported wherever you go next. What is gone for good is what only you added: your notes and your tweaks.

Below is the recovery, then an honest look at where to put your recipes depending on what you actually used Mealime for. If you saved your links before the date, skip straight to the import step.

The closure was announced on Mealime’s own closing page. Mealime was bought by Albertsons in 2021, and its users have been pointed toward Meals Hub, a planner built into Albertsons’ own grocery apps, which the notice says carries the Mealime recipes.

Recovering your recipes now

1. Write down the dishes you actually cooked. Not the whole catalog, just the ones your household made more than once. For most households that is somewhere between eight and twenty, and you probably remember them better than you think. Old grocery receipts and photos on your phone help.
2. If you saved links or screenshots before the date, start there. Test one link in a private browser window first. If the ingredients and steps still load, a link is enough for another app to rebuild the whole recipe. If it does not open, the screenshot is your copy.
3. Find the rest in Meals Hub. The closing notice says Meals Hub includes the Mealime recipes, so search there by name for each dish on your list. It lives inside Albertsons’ US grocery apps, which means it is only an option if you can use one of them.
4. Rewrite anything that was yours rather than Mealime’s. Notes you added, tweaks to quantities, the version where you doubled the garlic. That part existed nowhere else, so jot it down from memory while you still have it.
5. Then import into wherever you land. Any app with a recipe clipper or link import will take a working link, and some will read a screenshot. The mechanics are the same as saving a recipe from any website.

If you only do one thing this week, do step 1. A list of dish names is enough to rebuild a recipe collection; a blank page is not.

Where to go next, honestly

The right replacement depends entirely on which half of Mealime you used, and people tend to forget they were using both.

If you used Mealime for its recipes. You opened it to be told what to cook, picked from its catalog, and let it build the list. What you want is another app with its own recipe library and guided selection. Meals Hub is the official destination and is free, with the significant catch that it lives inside Albertsons’ grocery apps, so it is US-only and built to sell you groceries from one chain. eMeals does curated weekly menus in a lot of dietary styles with push-to-cart for major US grocers. Eat This Much generates plans from your targets rather than from a menu you browse. None of these are us, and if this is you, one of them is your answer.

If you used Mealime for the planning and the list. You brought your own idea of what to cook and mostly valued the week view and the automatic grocery list. That is a different market. Plan to Eat is the closest thing to a like-for-like: a proper planning calendar, shared household accounts, a recipe clipper, and it has published its own migration guide. Paprika is a one-time purchase rather than a subscription and is the strongest recipe clipper of the lot, though planning is lighter. AnyList is list-first, with meal planning added on top.

If the recipes you care about came from outside Mealime anyway. Plenty of people used Mealime as a holding pen for recipes they found elsewhere. In that case what you actually need is somewhere those links become real, structured recipes, which is the thing an AI recipe importer does, and then a plan that reads them.

The question worth asking before you pick

A shutdown is a bad time to choose in a hurry, and now that the deadline has passed there is no reason to. It is an excellent time to ask a question most people skip: what did you never use?

Mealime did roughly four jobs, and most households leaned on one or two. Before you sign up for the closest-looking thing, work out which jobs you actually want. The honest version of our own comparison of recipe keeper apps (and of the best free recipe keeper apps, if you would rather not pay again) makes the same point: the feature list is nearly irrelevant next to whether the app fits the way you already cook.

One more lesson worth taking from this: an app that cannot export your data can take it with it. Mealime is not unusual here, and the lock-in was invisible right up until the announcement. Its users found out the hard way. Whatever you choose next, find the export button before you put two years of recipes into it. If there isn’t one, that is the answer.

Where Mealhive fits

We are a planner, not a recipe catalog, so we are not the answer if you came to Mealime to be told what to cook. We are a good fit for the second group and the third: you paste a link, a photo, or pasted text, and it comes back as a clean recipe with structured ingredients and steps. That means any Mealime links or screenshots you kept go in directly, one paste each. Put a few of those recipes onto nights and the grocery list assembles itself, merged and grouped by aisle, shared live with whoever else shops. If that is the half of Mealime you will miss, sign up free.

Being straight about the rest: we are early, our recipe collection starts as yours rather than ours, and if you want push-to-cart at a US grocery chain we do not do that and are not planning to.

FAQ

Has Mealime shut down?

Yes. Mealime closed on 21 October 2026, as announced on its closing page. Personal data, including saved recipes, meal plans and grocery lists, is deleted with the app, and Pro subscriptions were wound down before the date.

Can I still get my recipes out of Mealime?

Not from the app itself: it never had an export button and it has now closed. What you can do is list the dishes you cooked and find them in Meals Hub, which carries the Mealime recipes, or import any links and screenshots you saved before the date into another app. Your own notes and edits are gone, so rewrite those from memory.

What happens to my Mealime data after the shutdown?

It is deleted. That includes saved recipes, meal plans, and grocery lists. The catalog recipes themselves survive in Meals Hub, but anything personal to your account does not.

What is the closest replacement for Mealime?

There isn’t one app that matches all of it, because Mealime combined a recipe catalog with a planner and a list. If you want the catalog and guided picking, look at Meals Hub, eMeals, or Eat This Much. If you want the planning calendar and automatic list with your own recipes, look at Plan to Eat, Paprika, or AnyList.

Is Meals Hub the same as Mealime?

No. Meals Hub is a planning feature inside Albertsons’ grocery apps, which includes Safeway, Vons, and Jewel-Osco. It is free, it carries the Mealime recipes and it is the official destination, but it is tied to one US grocery group, so it is not useful outside those stores or outside the US.