The Plan to Eat Story

Plan to Eat was created as a household solution to one family’s struggle with meal planning. In the early 2000s, Clint and Lisa Bounds had a growing family, and they wanted to be able to provide more nourishing, home-cooked meals for their kids. 

They started meal planning to reduce the number of times they ate takeout each week and to save money on groceries. Lisa purchased a stack of cookbooks and made a weekly habit of listing recipes on the family calendar and transcribing a shopping list of ingredients. 

Meal planning was the solution they needed, but the process was cumbersome and time-consuming. One week’s worth of meal planning took over an hour after picking out recipes and handwriting the grocery list. When Lisa went to the grocery store, the list was never organized right, so she wasted more time backtracking between aisles to get everything she needed.   

Clint saw Lisa’s frustration and wanted to help, so he went to the internet to find a digital solution, but at the time, none existed. Clint was working as a website designer, so Lisa petitioned him to use his skills to make a program that would store her recipes and create an organized shopping list for her.

In 2008 the first iteration of Plan to Eat was born. It was clunky, but it performed the important task of creating and organizing a shopping list from a list of recipes. They were still saving money and eating at home, but meal planning no longer took hours! 

Clint continued to work on Plan to Eat, adding features and making it work better, and faster. Lisa’s handwritten process had come to life on a website! In 2009, the first Black Friday sale happened and enabled Clint to quit his full-time job and work exclusively on Plan to Eat. He had fallen in love with developing the program and watching it help other families as much as his own. 

Plan to Eat has grown and evolved over the years, but the three main components remain, a personalized recipe book, meal planning calendar, and automated shopping list. These features (along with a dozen others) enable thousands of people to create their meal plans every week!