Why is meal planning still so hard in 2026?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot while building my side project.

Cooking itself isn’t that hard. But planning what to cook every week somehow feels unnecessarily complicated.

Recipes are saved in random places. Grocery lists live in another app. And meal planning usually ends up being a mix of notes, screenshots, and memory.

When I was an international student living away from home, this became even more obvious. I wanted to cook regularly, but organizing everything around cooking took more effort than the cooking itself.

That’s actually what pushed me to build Mummy’s Cooking, a simple meal planning app that combines recipes, meal plans, and grocery lists in one place.

But while building it, I kept wondering something:

Why does meal planning still feel like a manual process?

Some questions I’m curious about:

• Do you actually plan meals ahead of time or decide day-by-day?
• Do you use an app, spreadsheets, notes, or something else?
• What’s the most annoying part of planning meals every week?

Would love to hear how people here approach it.