Fall Update

Hi everyone! I've been silent for a few months, but I've been hard at work on a big update to The Scientific Meal Planner!

The first bit of news is that I've decided to switch The Scientific Meal Planner to a freemium model, where there will be a free version and a paid version going forward. I tried to make it work on a patron based model, but it's just proven unsustainable. I view this as a long term project and in order to realize the full vision, I have to start charging for it. I've tried to strike a balance between my mission to accelerate the adoption of healthy diets and the financial realities of running a project like this. The free version allows you to make meal plans, while the premium version unlocks convenience features including nutrient data, calorie control, replace recipe functionality, and shopping lists. This gives a powerful tool to everyone for free, but encourages them to help support my work if they can. 

It doesn't just support my work. I've partnered with whole food plant based recipe authors to feature their recipes in The Scientific Meal Planner. Recipe creator partners are an essential part of The Scientific Meal Planner, and thus a full 50% of premum pass revenue will directly support our recipe creator partners. This model creates a synergistic relationship between us and our recipe creator partners. It is my hope that these partnerships can help cultivate a healthy whole food plant based recipe creator community that cares about evidence based meal planning!

I've made added some significant features as well. The most important one is the ability to choose replacement recipes. You'll be presented with two sections, one for recommended recipes, and one for all other recipes. Recommended replacements fit into your meal plans settings (your calorie range, meeting >75% of the daily dozen, etc). You're free to choose non-recommended recipes, and it will tell you how selecting that recipe will affect your meal plan (whether it lowers the daily dozen percentage below 75%, or changes a certain day's calorie outside of your desired range). This replacement system gives you much more control over your meal plans and lets you customize them to your liking.

I've also added a favorites system. Just click the star on the recipe and it'll show up at the top of the list when you're making replacements.