Masala Menu
Update: Masala Menu is now on iPhone too, and in October it learned to keep your recipes: read what’s new. This post describes the app as it launched in September.
Masala Menu is a weekly meal planner for the meals your household already cooks. It’s free on Google Play, and you don’t need an account to use it.
You open it, fill in the week (breakfast, lunch, snacks and dinner), and the question that used to come up every evening has already been answered. That’s the whole idea.
Why we built it
Cooking dinner usually isn’t the hard part. Deciding is: the same “what should we make tonight?” at 7 p.m., asked by someone who’s tired, with half the ingredients missing because nobody planned the shop. Made every day, that small decision wears you down. We built Masala Menu to take that decision fatigue away.
Most meal planners we tried pushed new recipes, a sign-up and an endless feed of ideas. What we needed was simpler: one easy place to plan the week in a few taps, from the food we already love to cook, with a daily reminder to keep the plan on track. Plan once, and stop worrying about it for the rest of the week. That’s what we built.
What you can do with Masala Menu
Plan every meal of the week
The planner shows the week day by day, with breakfast, lunch, snacks and dinner under each. Pick a dish for each slot and you’re done. If your household eats differently (a lunchbox slot, a late supper, a post-workout meal), set up your own meal times instead.
Keep a library of the dishes you love
Every dish you add goes into your meal library, with your own photo of it. Mark each one veg, egg or non-veg, and as healthy or protein-rich, then star your favorites so they’re at the top when you plan. After a couple of weeks, planning is mostly tapping dishes you already have.
This week and next, free
You can plan the current week and the one after it on the free plan. When a week works, copy it forward instead of starting from scratch.
Share the plan with the household
Send the week’s plan as text to WhatsApp, Messages or anywhere else, so the person doing the shopping or the cooking knows what’s coming. Daily and weekly reminders nudge you to plan before the week starts.
See how you’re eating
The dashboard turns the meals you plan into weekly and monthly charts: your veg, egg and non-veg mix, and how many of your meals were healthy or protein-rich. Nothing to log; it reads straight from the plan.
Masala Menu Pro
Pro is for households that plan further ahead. It adds:
- Planning up to 4 weeks ahead
- Weekly grocery lists: keep a grocery list for each week with quantities, copy it to another week, and share it in one tap
- Exclusive themes
- Back up and restore your data
Private by design
There’s no account and no sign-up, and there are no ads. You can open the app and start planning within a minute of installing it, without handing over an email address first.
What you put into Masala Menu stays on your phone. Your meal library, photos, meal plans, meal times and grocery lists are kept in the app’s private storage on your device, not on our servers, so we never see what your household eats. A few things that follow from that:
- Reminders are set on your phone. The daily and weekly nudges are scheduled locally; nothing about your plan is sent anywhere to trigger them.
- The camera is only used when you ask. Masala Menu opens it when you choose to take a photo of a dish, and at no other time.
- Sharing is your call. A plan leaves your phone only when you tap share and pick where it goes, like a WhatsApp chat.
- Backups stay in your hands. With Pro you can back up and restore your data yourself, and your phone’s own Android or iCloud backup may include it too.
We collect basic usage and crash data to keep the app running smoothly, never your meals, ingredients or grocery lists. We don’t sell data or use your content to train AI. Read our privacy policy.
What’s next
An iPhone version is on its way, and we’re working on a place for your recipes inside the app, so the dish you plan and the way you cook it live together. We’ll post here when each one is ready.
If you try Masala Menu, we’d love to hear what your week looks like and how the app could make it easier. Send us your feedback and ideas from the app: open settings and tap Contact us.
