Mealime shutting down October 21: why, and how to save your recipes

Mealime's own App Store release notes now carry the sentence its users have been forwarding to each other all week:

"Mealime is shutting down on October 21st, 2026. As a farewell thank-you, Pro is now free for everyone. If you're a current Pro subscriber, your subscription will not renew."

That is the whole notice. Pro is free on the way out, and subscriptions will not renew — a decent way to close the door. Mealime was acquired by Albertsons Companies in 2021, and its users are being pointed toward Meals Hub, a feature inside Albertsons' grocery apps: Safeway, Vons, Jewel-Osco and Albertsons. Reaching it means holding an account in one of those store apps.

The part nobody put in a headline

Mealime has no export feature. There is no button that hands you your recipes, your saved meal plans or your grocery lists, and the shutdown notice does not add one. Everything a person built inside that app — the fifteen dinners they actually rotate, the staples list they have been refining for years, the allergy settings they got exactly right — leaves the way it arrived, by hand or not at all.

If you use Mealime, that is the thing to act on this week, before anything else. Open your favourites and screenshot every recipe you genuinely cook. Copy your top ten into a plain-text note, because screenshots cannot be searched or pasted later. Photograph your usual grocery list. Write down which eating style you had set and every allergen you had filtered, so you can re-enter them exactly. Fifteen minutes now, or nothing in November.

We wrote the page we would have wanted

We build PantryRx™, a free meal planner, so we are not a neutral party here and we would rather say so than pretend. What we tried to make is the page a Mealime user actually needs in September 2026, not an ad: the notice quoted in full with a link to the source, the list of things to copy out before October 21, and a straight feature-for-feature table of where each Mealime habit lands in PantryRx.

It is at Mealime is shutting down — here's what to use instead.

A few honest notes about that table, since they cut against us. We do not import from Mealime, and we will not claim to — there is no export, so there is no file to import. The real migration is manual: you copy your keepers out, then paste them into PantryRx's own recipe editor, which takes typed or pasted recipes. There is no Android version yet. And a chunk of what Mealime did, PantryRx simply does differently rather than better: it plans breakfast and lunch as well as dinner, and it starts from the food already in your kitchen instead of from an empty week.

What we can state plainly is the pricing, because it is the whole design. PantryRx is free, with all 974 recipes included and nothing behind a tier. No subscription, no in-app purchases, no ads, and no account — plans, pantry and preferences live on your device, in 47 languages, on iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch. That is not a farewell promotion. It is what the app is.

The broader lesson, which is boring and keeps being true

A meal planner that keeps your recipes on somebody's server is a meal planner somebody else can close. That is not a knock on Mealime, which by every account ran a good app for a decade and is winding down about as gracefully as a shutdown can be run. It is just the arithmetic of the arrangement. The apps we build keep their data on the phone, which is unglamorous and occasionally inconvenient — no syncing your plan to a partner's device — and it means the version on your phone keeps working whatever we do next.

If you are one of the people staring at a decade of saved dinners with no export button, start with the screenshots. Then, if you want it, the full move-across guide is here.

Mealime is a trademark of its owners. PantryRx is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Mealime or Albertsons Companies.