The Meals Hub App and Simmerset, Compared

What the Meals Hub App Is

Meals Hub is the meal planning part of the Albertsons family of grocery apps and websites. Mealime’s own closing page is where the handover is described, and it says Albertsons Companies acquired Mealime in 2021, which is why the recipes had somewhere to go. The page we read covers the United States.

Three things about it explain why a lot of Mealime households will take it and stop reading here.

• It is free. That is the entire price.
• The recipes carry over. The catalog people liked in Mealime is the catalog in Meals Hub. For many households that one fact settles the question.
• You do not need a store nearby. The closing page says it still works for households with no Albertsons store within reach, so the app is not useless to you because the nearest branch is two states away.

That same page does not describe how planning works inside Meals Hub, what the finished shopping list looks like, or which of Mealime’s settings survive the move. We are not going to guess at any of it. Everywhere below where our evidence runs out, this page says so instead of filling the gap with something that sounds right.

One more piece of context from the closing page. Mealime advertised more than 200 personalization options, recipes built to cook in about 30 minutes, and grocery lists sorted by category. That is the product people are leaving, and it was a good one. Meals Hub inherits its catalog.

What Simmerset Is

The Spoonacular team built Simmerset, and they have been working on recipe data since 2013.

Simmerset works in weeks. You answer a short set of questions (how many people eat, what must never be on the plate, what you would rather skip, how much time a weeknight really has) and it proposes three to seven dinners. Instead of browsing a catalog and saving things for later, you keep the dinners you like, swap the rest, and the grocery list is built from whatever survives that.

What the list does:

• One list, merged. Ingredients that repeat across dinners become one line, with the amounts added up wherever the units allow it.
• Grouped by aisle. Every line sits under an aisle, so you cross the shop once.
• Each line names its dinner. Drop Wednesday and you can see what to leave on the shelf.
• No store to choose. There is no retailer account anywhere in the product. The list is written to be shopped wherever you shop.
• Your data leaves when you do. Export everything as JSON whenever you like, and delete the account yourself without writing to anybody.

Plus is USD 4.99 a month or USD 39.99 a year, tax included. The free tier has no time limit on it.

Then there are the missing parts, which you should hear from us rather than find on day two. Simmerset has no pantry tracking, so it will not tell you that you already own the rice. It does not plan to calorie or macro targets, so if you plan around numbers this is the wrong tool. And there is no native iOS or Android app yet: it is a web app that installs onto your phone from the browser. The recipe catalog is in English.

Meals Hub and Simmerset at a Glance

Store Integration and the Shopping Trip

Meals Hub lives inside the grocery apps and websites of a chain a lot of American households already shop at. Planning dinner and buying the food for it happen in the same place, on the same account, in the app that is already on the phone. If that describes your Tuesday, an independent planner cannot beat it, because the independent planner has to hand the list back to you and step out of the way.

That account is the price of admission, and it deserves naming. Mealime says you should create or sign in to an Albertsons family store account, and that certain preferences and settings have to be set up again inside Meals Hub. So there is a signup, and a round of re-entering, before your first plan. If you already shop there and have the account, that is a formality. If you do not, it is what you are trading for everything in the paragraph above.

Simmerset steps out of the way on purpose. There is no retailer account in it and no store to pick, so there is nothing to sign up for and nothing to set up a second time, and your list is not tied to anyone’s catalog or anyone’s delivery window. You can take it to a supermarket, a corner shop, a market stall, or all three in one afternoon. That is real freedom and it is also real friction, because you are the one carrying the list around the shop and ticking it off. Nobody fills a basket for you.

What an independent list has to be good at, then, is the walk itself. Grouping by aisle is the part that decides whether you cross the shop once or three times, and merging quantities is the part that stops you buying two bags of spinach because two recipes each wanted half a bag. Those are the jobs a planner can still do for you when it has no relationship with the shop, and they are the jobs Simmerset is built around.

Which of those you want depends on a question only you can answer. Do you shop in one place, mostly, and would you like the planning to happen there too? Then the tight integration is worth more than the independence. Do you shop wherever is convenient, and does the idea of a planner asking for a loyalty account annoy you? Then it is the other way round.

Verdict: Meals Hub. It is built into the shop, and the store account is what you pay for that. Simmerset deliberately has neither the account nor the integration, and there is no version of this trade where being connected to no store beats being connected to your store.

Weekly Structure and the Plan

Simmerset starts from the week rather than from the recipe. The unit is three to seven dinners, chosen together, and the whole product is arranged behind that idea. You are handed a week you can accept, edit or throw back.

The list is downstream of that choice, which is where it shows. Quantities merge across the dinners you kept. Every line knows which dinners asked for it. Change your mind about Thursday and the list tells you which half bag of spinach was for Thursday, instead of leaving you to work it out in the vegetable aisle.

The number itself matters more than it sounds. Three to seven dinners is a week for households that eat out sometimes, cook leftovers on a Monday and do not want a grid with fourteen boxes staring back at them. You are choosing how many nights you are actually cooking, and everything after that follows from the answer. Simmerset proposes the dinners before you create an account, so you can see what a week looks like for your household before deciding whether any of this is for you.

About Meals Hub we have to be careful. The closing page we read describes the handover and the catalog. It says nothing about how planning works inside Meals Hub. Mealime was a well made planner whose lists that same page describes as sorted by category, so assuming its successor is weak here would be unfair. We have not verified it either way, and this site does not publish facts it has not verified.

Verdict: Simmerset, on the evidence. That is a verdict on what is documented, not a claim that Meals Hub plans badly. If the weekly structure is the thing you care about most, try Meals Hub yourself before October 21, while Mealime is still around to compare it with.

Allergies, Diets and Dislikes

Most planners treat “I am allergic to shellfish” and “I do not really like mushrooms” as two entries on the same list. They are different things, and the difference shows up on the night somebody is ill.

Simmerset asks for them separately and handles them differently. Allergies and diets are hard exclusions: a recipe that breaks one is removed from the pool and never comes back, however well it fits the rest of your week. Dislikes are soft: a recipe you would rather skip drops down the ranking and gets crowded out by better matches, but it is not deleted. When the exclusions leave too few recipes, the week gets fewer dinners.

The Mealime side of this deserves credit. Its closing page advertised more than 200 personalization options, which is a lot of tuning and more than most planners bother with. What that page does not say is which of those settings travel to Meals Hub. If you are moving across and somebody in the house has an allergy, check the settings yourself on the first plan rather than assuming they came with the recipes.

Verdict: Simmerset. The hard line between an exclusion and a dislike is something we can point at a test for. On the Meals Hub side it is the gap in the public record, and an allergy is the worst possible thing to be uncertain about.

Your Recipes and Your Data

Neither product can fix the first part of this. Mealime’s closing page says personal data is deleted when the app shuts down, and Mealime has never had an export feature. Your ratings, your saved plans and your history do not travel, to Meals Hub or to us or anywhere else. Anyone promising to import your Mealime account is promising something that does not exist. Our switching guide lists what to write down before October 21, which takes about ten minutes and is the only migration anybody can offer you.

On recipes, Meals Hub has the better answer and we should say so. The catalog moves across, whole and free. If what you are attached to is the specific set of dinners you cooked for the last few years, that library exists in one place, and it is not here. Simmerset brings the Spoonacular catalog instead, in English, and it matches the meal names you type in to the closest dishes it has. A match is not the same as the original.

On data going forward, we have the better answer. Everything you build in Simmerset exports as JSON whenever you want it, and you can delete your account yourself without asking anyone’s permission. That is on the free tier too, not held back as a paid feature. What Meals Hub does about export and deletion is not covered by the page we read, so we are not going to describe it either way.

No verdict here. Meals Hub keeps the recipes you liked. Simmerset lets you take your own work out again. Those are different goods, and which one matters more is your call.

Price and Devices

Meals Hub is free. Simmerset has a free tier with no time limit, and a Plus tier at USD 4.99 a month or USD 39.99 a year, tax included. Free is a better price than USD 4.99, and pretending otherwise would be silly.

The device picture splits the same way. Meals Hub is in the Albertsons grocery apps and on their websites, so it arrives on the phone through an app store, installed the normal way. Simmerset is a web app: you open it in a browser and install it to your home screen from there, and it behaves like an app afterwards, but there is no native iOS or Android build yet. If it has to be in the App Store for you, that is a real reason to wait or to go elsewhere.

What the money buys, if you spend it, is the planning: the week, the merged list, the exclusions that hold. What it does not buy is a pantry, a week planned to a calorie target, or a native app, because none of those exist yet. We would rather you knew that before paying than after.

The free tier is worth a line of its own, because free tiers usually come with a countdown. This one does not. It has no time limit, so you can plan weeks on it for as long as you want and decide about Plus whenever you feel like it, or never.

Verdict: Meals Hub. Free, in the app stores, and already on your phone if you shop at one of those chains. A paid web app has to be noticeably better at the job to be worth USD 4.99 a month, and for plenty of households it will not be.

Which One Should You Choose

Choose Meals Hub if:

• You shop at an Albertsons chain. The planning and the buying happen in one place, which is worth more than anything on the other list.
• The Mealime recipes are what you are attached to. They are there, free, and nowhere else.
• You do not want to pay anything. Reasonable, and Meals Hub is the free option that keeps the catalog.
• You want a native app today. Meals Hub is in the app stores. Simmerset is not, yet.

Choose Simmerset if:

• You want the week decided, not a catalog to browse. Three to seven dinners proposed, then edited by you, with the list following from what you kept.
• You shop in more than one place. No retailer account and no store to pick, so the list goes wherever you go.
• Somebody in the house has an allergy. Allergies are asked apart from dislikes. When too few recipes are left, the week gets fewer dinners, and none of them has the allergen.
• You want to be able to leave. JSON export whenever you like, and you can delete the account yourself.
• You are outside the United States. The page we read describes Meals Hub for the US. Simmerset comes in six languages, with a recipe catalog in English.

If neither list describes you, our comparison of meal planners by the quality of their grocery list covers six more apps on that one question.