I Tried ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude for Meal Planning. Then I Built My Own.

I use AI for pretty much everything. Writing, coding, research. So when I got serious about meal planning, ChatGPT was the obvious first stop.

General-purpose AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude can generate solid one-off recipes, but they fail at ongoing meal planning because they forget your preferences, pantry inventory, and meal history between conversations. A dedicated AI meal planner stores this context permanently, so suggestions get better over time instead of starting from scratch.

And ChatGPT impressed me at first. Ask it for a 30-minute weeknight dinner under 600 calories and you'll get something solid in seconds. Ask it to swap out dairy, done. Want a full week of meals? It'll generate one. According to HelloFresh/Wakefield Research, 69% of Americans have used AI to help get dinner on the table or are open to trying it. This isn't some niche thing anymore.

I tried Gemini and Claude too. Same deal. All three are genuinely good at generating recipes on demand.

The problem isn't the first conversation. It's the tenth.

Most "I tried AI meal planning" articles test it for a week and write a review. Men's Health tested ChatGPT for two weeks and found meals got repetitive and bland by week 2. Delish had 5 grocery items go completely unused from a single week of AI-planned meals.

I used ChatGPT longer than either of them. Here's what happens:

Week 1: Fresh suggestions, handles dietary preferences well, generates a reasonable grocery list.

Week 2: It suggests stir-fry again. You remind it you had stir-fry twice last week. It apologizes and picks something else. But it also doesn't know you still have half the groceries from last week. It generates a full shopping list like your kitchen is empty.

Week 3: You've told it about your nut allergy four times across four different conversations. It suggests almonds again. You start copy-pasting your preferences at the top of every new chat because nothing carries over.

There's also a subtler problem with the recipes themselves. You ask for a dinner idea and ChatGPT suggests something that sounds great. Except you don't have two of the key ingredients. You tell it what you're missing, and it swaps in substitutes. Now you've got a recipe that was designed around ingredients you don't have, with workarounds patched in. It technically works, but it's never as good as a recipe that was built around your actual ingredients from the start. A meal planner that knows your pantry skips the substitution step entirely. It just suggests something different that uses what you have.

The grocery list problem compounds fast. ChatGPT assumes you're starting from scratch every week. After a few weeks, you've got duplicate spices, three half-used bags of rice, and fresh produce going bad because it planned meals you never made. This is how the "what's for dinner" question ends up costing you $2,300 a year.

This isn't a ChatGPT bug. It's a structural limitation. ChatGPT has a memory feature, but it can only store a small amount of context. That fills up fast when you're tracking dietary preferences, allergies, household size, budget, cooking skill, and what you ate this week. Once full, older information gets permanently pushed out. Your nut allergy from week 1? Gone.

I figured Google Gemini might handle this better. Google even has a Recipe Genie Gem specifically for turning leftovers into meals. It's good at multi-step workflows: find a recipe, build a grocery list, suggest substitutions.

Same problem though. It doesn't know what's in your fridge unless you tell it every single time. It doesn't remember that you made coconut curry last Tuesday. It can't flag the spinach in the back of your fridge that's about to go bad.

Claude (I use it daily for work, so I tested it for meal planning too) surprised me. It asks better clarifying questions than the other two. "What's your cooking skill level?" "How much time do you have tonight?" Tom's Guide found Claude produced the most detailed step-by-step instructions in a head-to-head recipe test.

But it hits the same wall. No persistent memory. No pantry tracking. Every conversation starts from zero.

Three different AIs. Three different personalities. One shared problem: none of them remember you.

Generating a recipe is a question. Meal planning is a relationship.

A good meal planner needs to know that you bought a block of tofu on Monday, used half on Tuesday, and still have the rest. That you're 400 calories short for the day. That you've had pasta twice this week. That the bell peppers are going soft.

That's not a single prompt. That's accumulated context from dozens of interactions over weeks.

General chatbots treat every meal question as an isolated problem. But your dinner tonight is connected to your lunch tomorrow, your grocery run on Sunday, your nutrition goals for the week, and the leftovers sitting in your fridge right now. No amount of prompt engineering fixes the fact that ChatGPT can't hold all of that context at once.

77% of Americans say they're too tired to cook after work. The last thing anyone needs at 6pm is to spend 10 minutes re-explaining their entire kitchen to a chatbot before getting a dinner suggestion.

Here's how the approaches stack up:

Feature	ChatGPT	Gemini	Claude	MealThinker
Generates good recipes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Handles dietary restrictions	Per chat	Per chat	Per chat	Permanently
Remembers your preferences	No	No	No	Yes
Tracks your pantry	No	No	No	Yes
Knows what you ate this week	No	No	No	Yes
Prioritizes expiring food	No	No	No	Yes
Builds grocery lists from gaps	No	Sort of	No	Yes
Tracks nutrition automatically	No	No	No	Yes

The first row is where chatbots shine. That's what convinces you they're "good enough." The rest of the table is what matters once you try doing this for more than a week. See how MealThinker handles each of these in the full feature overview.

This is the core difference between general AI and purpose-built AI meal planning. Intelligence without memory is a fancy recipe generator. For diets with tight macro targets like keto, where a single condiment can blow your entire carb budget, or low-FODMAP, where the same food changes from safe to dangerous based on portion size, this problem gets even worse.

After months of copy-pasting my preferences into ChatGPT, re-explaining my fridge to Gemini, and watching Claude forget my allergies for the fifth time, I built what I wanted.

MealThinker uses AI for the recipe generation (Gemini, specifically). But it wraps that intelligence with persistent memory. Your dietary preferences, allergies, pantry inventory, nutrition goals, meal history, and taste preferences are stored permanently. When you ask "what should I make tonight?", it already knows your whole situation.

Spinach about to go bad? It shows up in tonight's suggestion. Had pasta yesterday? It picks something different. 500 calories short for the day? Factored in automatically.

It's what ChatGPT would be if it remembered you. Watch the full demo.

If you're tired of re-explaining yourself to a chatbot every time you want dinner ideas, try MealThinker free for 7 days. No credit card required.

Can ChatGPT replace a meal planning app?

For one-off recipe ideas, ChatGPT works well. For ongoing weekly meal planning, it falls short. ChatGPT can't remember your preferences between sessions, doesn't track what's in your pantry, and can't monitor nutrition over time. A dedicated AI meal planner like MealThinker stores your context permanently so every suggestion builds on the last. For a deeper comparison, read why ChatGPT and traditional meal apps both fail.

Is Gemini better than ChatGPT for meal planning?

They're roughly equal. Google's Recipe Genie Gem is solid for turning leftovers into meals, and Gemini handles multi-step cooking workflows well. But it has the same core limitation: no persistent memory across sessions. Neither remembers your preferences, pantry inventory, or meal history from one conversation to the next.

What's the best AI for ongoing meal planning?

A dedicated AI meal planner that stores your preferences and tracks your kitchen over time. For families, Ollie handles household meal logistics. For individuals, MealThinker focuses on personal nutrition and kitchen memory. General chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude generate solid individual recipes but lack the persistent memory needed for consistent weekly planning. According to HelloFresh research, 69% of Americans are open to using AI for cooking, but the tool needs to remember your context to replace manual planning.

Do AI meal planners track your pantry?

Most traditional meal planning apps don't. They generate recipes and shopping lists assuming you're starting from scratch each week. MealThinker tracks your pantry through natural conversation. Tell it what you bought and it updates your inventory. When it suggests meals, it prioritizes ingredients that are about to expire to reduce waste.

Can I use ChatGPT and a meal planning app together?

You could, but you'd be doing double the work. The appeal of AI meal planning is that it handles everything in one place: recipe generation, pantry tracking, nutrition logging, and grocery lists. Using ChatGPT for recipes and a separate app for tracking means manually copying information between tools. A dedicated AI meal planner like MealThinker combines both so you don't have to.

How much does AI meal planning cost compared to ChatGPT?

ChatGPT Plus costs $20/month. Gemini Advanced costs $20/month. Both give you general AI access but zero meal-planning-specific features. MealThinker costs $15/month (or $150/year) and includes persistent memory, pantry tracking, nutrition logging, and automatic grocery lists. There's a 7-day free trial with no credit card required.