Automated Meal Planning with Trello

[#1]

In case you missed my livestream the other day as I built a meal planner in Trello, here's the final result!

I built a meal planner that has some "auto generate a meal" stuff and some rules for creating a shopping list based off the approved "meals on deck", as well as option for swapping out meals.

I was able to make one that does three things:

Auto-generate three random meals with a click:

Click one button and get three meals for the week (Butler rule that randomly picks one card from each of my three key lists - "Meatless", "Quick", and "Generic". You could easily make it grab 2 meals from each list, or 2 meals from one list and 1 one meal from another etc.)

Swap a meal and get another:

Random generator pick something, but you're not in the mood? Just add a label to send it back to the right list (Butler rules that give cards a custom field value of the List Name that they're currently in when created, and then when that label is applied, it returns them to whatever list is in their custom field.) 

Then click a button on the type of meal you want and get another one!

Generate a shopping list (with labels for tags based on what section of the grocery store it's in!)

Just add the "approved" label to a card, and it will automatically generate a shopping list for you based on the ingredients for that recipe! I even added some logic that will apply labels to those ingredients based on which part of the grocery store they're in, and then you can use the "Sort Shopping List" board button to sort that list by grocery section (aka by label).

Let me know what you think! I created a template but it involves a lot of Butler automation and those rules don't copy over nicely, so I wrote up this post that explains how to create those rules and a checklist for the rules you need: https://trello.substack.com/p/automated-meal-planning-with-trello

Also made this short video demo-ing how it works. 

Let me know what you think and if you have any trouble implementing, let me know and I'll help you out!

[Svenja Lorenzen]

I love this! I designed a game on Trello (https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Teamwork-Lab-articles/Team-Icebreaker-Pickpocket-an-energizing-team-game/ba-p/1766337) and this automation is a perfect addition. I'll definitely try to add this.

Thank you so much for sharing!