The shopping list in a meal plan is automatically assembled as you add food items and recipes to the meal plan. You cannot edit the shopping list directly, but there are some workarounds if you want to make changes to how it looks like.

You can change how the shopping list groups ingredients in the settings, click here to learn more. This will allow you to group items by name, alias, portion size, etc.

You can also check in the settings for an option to calculate total servings of a recipe in the meal plan. So you will have the option to either include the amounts in the plan, or the amounts to cook a whole recipe. E.g. if you have a recipe with 36 servings to make 36 muffins in the oven, you could choose to list the ingredients for all 36 servings in the plan, or just the amount included in the plan which could be much less, e.g. 4.

Finally, as a workaround, if you want to customize the look of the shopping list, you can follow these steps:

  1. Finish working on your meal plan and ensure no further edits will be made
  2. Go to the Shopping List tab
  3. Select all the text in the screen for your shopping list
  4. Press copy (ctrl+C in Windows or cmd+C in Mac). You can also right-click with your mouse and click on Copy.
  5. Go to the Comments tab
  6. Paste your contents with ctrl+V in Windows, or cmd+V in Mac, or right clicking and selecting Paste.
  7. Now you have the contents of the shopping list in an editable form. You can make edits and adjust it as you see fit
  8. When you are done editing the shopping list, you can share the meal plan with your client via the portal, or download a PDF. Whatever option you go for, you should uncheck the box for sharing the shopping list, as in this case you will have your custom version in the comments section. If you send both the comments and shopping list options to a client that would be confusing as they would receive 2 copies.

Although you can use the workaround above to edit the shopping list, you should take into account that, if you add or edit items in your meal plan, these changes will not be automatically reflected in your custom text shopping list. So you should only opt for this strategy once you have finished your meal plan to avoid errors.