Generate weekly dinner meal plans and shopping lists using Mealie

Description

This n8n template demonstrates how to automatically generate a full week of dinner meal plans in your self hosted Mealie instance and create a corresponding shopping list based on those planned meals.


Perfect for anyone who wants hands off weekly planning. Set it once and let it build your dinners and prep your ingredient data every week.

How it works
A Schedule Trigger runs once per week to kick things off.
A Code node generates the next 7 calendar days starting from today.
For each day, we call the Mealie API to generate a random dinner entry.
Using the returned recipe slug, we fetch the full recipe details from Mealie.
A new shopping list is created in Mealie for the week.
The recipe data is normalized into a clean structure that includes servings and ingredient details, ready for shopping list aggregation or further processing.

What this gives you
Automatic weekly dinner planning
Structured ingredient data for every recipe
A named shopping list for the week
Clean normalized JSON that can easily be extended to:
Aggregate ingredients across recipes
Remove duplicates
Scale quantities
Export to external services

How to use
By default, this runs weekly using the Schedule Trigger. You can change the interval or replace it with:
A Manual Trigger
A Webhook
A Form submission
Make sure your Mealie API endpoint and Bearer credentials are configured correctly.
Adjust the entryType field if you want breakfast or lunch instead of dinner.

Requirements
A running Mealie instance with API access enabled
HTTP Bearer credentials configured in n8n
Network access to your Mealie server