The Plan to Eat Story
In the early 2000’s, Clint and Lisa Bounds had a growing family, and among the new challenges of parenting was learning how to feed more than two people. Lisa not only wanted to provide nourishing meals for her family, but also learn to be a better cook and save money by eating out less.
Lisa purchased cookbooks and began planning new recipes on a calendar. She learned new cooking skills and loved having control over what she was feeding her family. Through this new process of meal planning, she also started saving money at the grocery store and wasting less uneaten food each week. Plus, sharing a home-cooked meal became a special time of connection for their family.
Lisa was thrilled about the positive changes meal planning created for her family, but the process of meal planning and grocery shopping was not ideal. One week’s worth of meal planning took over an hour after picking out recipes and transcribing them into a grocery list. Then she would go to the store and the list was never organized right, so she would end up backtracking between aisles to get everything she needed.
Clint saw Lisa’s frustration and wanted to help, so he went to the internet to find a digital solution. He thought, “there has to be someone out there who’s making this process easier”, but his searches came up with nothing. Clint had web design and development skills, so Lisa petitioned him to make a digital program that would store her recipes and create an organized shopping list for her.
It took some time, but in 2008 the first iteration of Plan to Eat was born. It was clunky, but it performed the important task of compiling a shopping list from selected recipes. Meal planning no longer took hours, they were still saving money and wasting less food, and now they had even more time to spend together as a family.
For months, Clint continued to work on Plan to Eat, making it work better, faster, and added a digital planning calendar. Lisa’s handwritten process had come to life on a website!
Clint and Lisa used Plan to Eat for their family and found it incredibly helpful. They knew other people would benefit from it too. Clint asked friends who meal planned to beta test the program and continued to make updates. He eventually quit his full time job to work exclusively on Plan to Eat. It was an intimidating transition, but he had fallen in love with developing the program and watching it help other families too.
Plan to Eat has grown and evolved over the years, but the three main components remain: a personalized recipe book, meal planning calendar, and an automated shopping list. These features, along with a dozen others, now enable thousands of people to create their meal plans every week!
If you’re interested in hearing the full Plan to Eat story, listen to Episode #3 of The Plan to Eat Podcast, where we interview our owner and founder, Clint.