Shop meals. We’ll fill the cart.
Mealio is a recipe app that does the shopping part. Save a meal you want to cook, pick your grocery store, and Mealio adds every ingredient to your online cart — so deciding what to eat and buying what it needs stop being two separate chores.
What you can do with it
- Browse meals published by cooks and creators, or save your own.
- Send the ingredients to your grocery cart in one step. Mealio supports most major grocery retailers — you'll see the full list when you pick your store.
- Adjust before you buy. Nothing is ordered — the items land in your own cart at your own store, and you check out there.
- Share a meal with anyone, whether or not they use Mealio.
For recipe creators
Creators publish recipes to Mealio so their audience can cook them without copying an ingredient list into a shopping app by hand.
A creator can also connect the place they already publish — a website, or their YouTube channel. With their permission, Mealio reads new posts from that one source, pulls the ingredients and steps out of them, and puts the result in front of the creator to approve, edit or decline. Nothing is published under anyone’s name without them saying so.
Creators who connect a YouTube channel can optionally have Mealio add a link to their recipe at the end of that video’s description. That setting is off unless the creator turns it on, and it only ever touches videos on their own channel.
Apply to be a creator
What we ask for, and why
Mealio asks for the least it needs to do each job, and nothing is requested until you take the action that needs it.
- Your email address — so that you can sign in, recover your account, and be told about your own recipes. It is not sold or shared for advertising.
- Access to your grocery store, granted by you at the store — so that Mealio can search that store’s products and add the ingredients to your cart. Mealio never receives your store password, never places an order, and does not read pages unrelated to filling that cart.
- Read access to a creator’s own YouTube channel, if they connect one — so that Mealio can find recipes they have already published and turn them into something their audience can cook and shop from. We read the video list, titles and descriptions of the channel that was connected, and nothing else. Every recipe found this way is shown to the creator to approve, edit or decline before it appears anywhere.
- Permission to read that channel’s captions — because a great many recipe videos say the ingredients out loud instead of listing them in the description, and without the captions there is nothing for Mealio to read. We only ask for this if a creator asks us to read their captions, from the YouTube card in their creator portal; connecting a channel by itself asks to read titles and descriptions and nothing more. Captions are read only for videos on the channel that was connected, and only for a video whose description is too short to hold the recipe.
- Permission to edit that channel’s video descriptions — so that a creator can have Mealio add a link to their recipe at the end of the description of the video it came from. We only ask for this if a creator turns that feature on. It only ever adds our link and changes nothing else, and it applies only to videos on the channel they connected. A creator can turn it off, disconnect the channel in Mealio, or revoke access from their Google account at any time.
Google grants these last two through one permission (“youtube.force-ssl”), so a creator who asks for either will see Google’s own wording, which mentions both. Mealio treats them as two separate decisions and asks for the permission on whichever one the creator made: editing a description additionally requires a setting the creator turns on themselves, which is off by default, is checked on our server before every edit, and which asking to have captions read does not change.
Mealio does not use information obtained from Google APIs for advertising, does not sell or transfer it, and does not use it to train machine-learning models. The privacy policy sets out all of it in full.
What it costs
Free to use for up to three saved meals. Full access is a paid subscription — see pricing for the current plans.
Your data
Mealio never receives your grocery store password: you sign in to the store directly, and Mealio acts on your behalf only to search products and add them to your cart. It does not monitor your browsing or read pages unrelated to filling that cart.
The privacy policy covers all of it, including exactly what a connected YouTube channel allows and how to disconnect it. The terms of service set out the rest.