Innovator Video: Siansplan.com Aims to Simplify Meal Planning & Reduce Food Waste

There is certainly no shortage of recipe websites catering to health conscious home cooks, but recipes are only the first step. Time, food access, cost and education are often cited as barriers to healthy cooking, but research indicates rising food costs are forcing people to cook more.

Siansplan.com is a new a new meal planning tool designed to help families make cooking and shopping easy, fun and more efficient. Started by Sian Breslin, the owner of an Ireland-based cooking school and guest house, siansplan.com aims to tackle four core issues facing home cooks: “Control food shopping, optimise health, reduce food waste and eliminate meal time stress.”

The website uses a method called ‘Meal Plan in Colour,’ a color coded system to simplify meal planning. Four days are red for cooking from scratch. One day is green for leftovers, which helps families reduce food waste and make sure they are getting your money’s worth from the fresh ingredients in your kitchen. Blue days are for batch cooking, where  the cook can make two to three dishes that can be frozen for flexible days when they don’t have time to cook. White days are flexible days for eating batch meals or dining out. After the week has been color coded, recipes from the website or from a personal collection can be dragged and dropped into a user’s calendar. Once the eating plan has been created, recipe ingredients are automatically added to a user’s grocery list.

Sianplan.com offers a free basic plan that allows user to create a personal cookbook and save an unlimited number of recipes; a confident cook subscription that allows users to save ten meal plans and plan four weeks at a time; and a Fabulous Foodie Plan that allows users to save twenty meals and plan four weeks at a time.