Mealime Shut Down: What Happened and How to Rebuild Your Recipe Box

What happened to Mealime?

Mealime was a free meal planning app with a paid Pro tier. Albertsons Companies, the grocery group behind Safeway, Albertsons, Vons and Jewel-Osco, bought it in 2021. In 2026 Mealime posted a closing notice saying the app would be discontinued as of October 21, 2026 and that it was "moving to Meals Hub", the meal planner built into Albertsons Companies' store apps and websites.

The notice made four promises:

• Pro subscribers would not be charged any more subscription fees before the shutdown.
• All Pro recipes and features would be free for everyone until the app closed.
• All Mealime recipes would stay available on Meals Hub, which is free.
• All personal data would be deleted when the app shut down.

That last point is the one that matters most if you used Mealime for years. The recipes survived. Your account did not.

What carried over to Meals Hub, and what didn't?

Here's how the pieces of a typical Mealime account fared, based on Mealime's own notice.

Meals Hub is supported by the same team that made Mealime's recipes, so the recipes themselves should look familiar. What's gone is the layer you built on top of them: which recipes you loved, the tweaks you noted, and the weekly rhythm you'd settled into.

Can you still get your Mealime data back?

Probably not from Mealime. The notice offered no export, and the deletion happened at shutdown. You can still recover a surprising amount from elsewhere:

1. Search your photos. Screenshots of recipes and shopping lists often outlive the apps they came from.
2. Search your email and messages. Shopping lists you shared, or recipes you sent to someone, may still be there.
3. Check your browser history. If you ever opened Mealime recipes on the web, the recipe names are a good starting list.
4. Ask the people you cooked for. "What did we eat that you liked?" is a fine way to rebuild a favorites list.
5. Check your subscriptions. If you paid for Pro through the App Store or Google Play, confirm the subscription is gone in your account settings. Mealime's notice doesn't mention refunds, so any refund request goes through the store you paid.

How to rebuild your recipe box in an afternoon

You don't need to recreate everything. Most households cook the same 10 to 20 meals on repeat, so start there.

1. Write down the meals you actually cooked. Not the ones you saved. The ones you made more than once.
2. Find each recipe. Search Meals Hub for the Mealime version, or look for the original on the creator's site or social account.
3. Save each one somewhere you control. A recipe app that imports from a link, a photo or pasted text makes this a few seconds per recipe. A shared note or document works too, as long as you can search it.
4. Fix the details while they're fresh. Add your own notes, your usual number of servings, and swaps you always make. Our recipe scaler can resize an ingredient list if Mealime's default servings never matched your household.
5. Rebuild your weekly routine. If Mealime's main job was answering "what's for dinner?", a short weekly plan does the same thing. Our guide to planning a week of meals walks through a 30-minute routine.

Save the recipes before you need them. Rebuilding ten favorites on a quiet Sunday is easy. Searching for a half-remembered recipe at 6 p.m. on a Tuesday is not.

Should you use Meals Hub or switch to another app?

It depends on what you used Mealime for.

If you mostly cooked Mealime's own recipes, Meals Hub is the closest thing to what you had, and it's free. If you were already saving recipes from TikTok, Instagram or food blogs alongside Mealime, a recipe saver keeps all of them together.

What to look for in a Mealime replacement

Whatever you choose, check these before you put years of recipes into it:

• Importing. Can it save a recipe from a link, a video, a screenshot or a cookbook photo, or do you have to type it in?
• Servings. Mealime's portion-based planning was one of its best features. Make sure the replacement scales ingredient amounts, not just the serving count.
• One grocery list. Ingredients from several recipes should combine into one list, grouped by aisle.
• Your diet and allergies. Filters should hide what you can't eat rather than make you skip it every time.
• A way out. Mealime is a reminder that apps close. Prefer one that lets you share recipes as links, print them or keep a copy outside the app.

Where MealMint fits

We build MealMint, so take this section as our pitch rather than a neutral review. MealMint saves recipes from TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, Facebook, recipe websites, pasted text and photos. It plans the days and meals you choose around your diet, allergies and dislikes, lets you batch cook portions, and turns a plan into one grocery list sorted by aisle. Any recipe can be shared as a link that opens on the web, so a copy always lives outside your phone.

If you're rebuilding after Mealime, start with your ten favorite meals and see how it feels.