Tailored recipe service aims to bring families together around the dinner table

Seattle's gatheredtable is working with families to customize their weekly meal plans and better optimize the time they spend at home.

Ensuring the entire family gets fed every day of the week can be a difficult and thankless task. We’ve already seen services such as Brazil’s Gulala, which prepares and dispatches all of the ingredients for a meal the day beforehand. Now Seattle’s gatheredtable is working with families to customize their weekly meal plans and better optimize the time they spend at home.

Created by mother-of-three Mary Egan, the service aims to help busy parents develop a meal plan that helps them spend less time at the shops and in the kitchen, and more time with their family. Those signing up first answer a questionnaire about their lifestyle — how often they’d like to cook, what food preferences or allergies they have, and how healthy they’d like to be. gatheredtable then trawls verified recipes that fit each individual family. Users can even add their own personal favorite recipes from the web. A smart grocery list is created that details exactly what customers need to buy at the beginning of each week. It takes into account when meals are cooked and what users already have in their pantry, and automatically updates the grocery list to reflect what’s needed.

The service costs USD 10 a month and could help families save time, money and eat more healthily by avoiding takeouts or frozen readymeals. Are there other ways to help families keep better track of the food they need each week?