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How to save your Mealime recipes before it shuts down on October 21

Mealime shuts down October 21, 2026 and has no export. A 10-minute way to save your favorite recipes and meal plan, and where to take them next.

Published Oct 7, 2026 · 2 min read

Mealime is closing on October 21, 2026. Its own closing notice says all personal data is deleted when the app shuts down, and there’s no export button. If you’ve built up a list of favorites or a weekly rotation your family actually eats, that’s the part to save now.

Here’s the quickest way I know to do it, and what to do with the copies afterwards.

What happens to what on October 21

• Mealime’s own recipe library keeps going. Mealime says its recipes will continue on Meals Hub, inside the Albertsons Companies grocery apps (Safeway, Albertsons, Vons, Jewel-Osco, ACME Markets, Shaw’s, Tom Thumb, Randalls and others).
• Your saved favorites, meal plans and grocery lists don’t move. They’re personal data, and they’re deleted.
• Pro is free until the end, so there’s nothing left to cancel.

So the job is narrow: keep the list of what your family likes, and the recipes you’d want to cook again.

Save your favorites in about 10 minutes

1. Make an album first. In your phone’s Photos app, make an album called “Mealime recipes.” Everything goes there, so you’re not hunting through your camera roll later.
2. Open your saved recipes in Mealime and go through them one at a time.
3. Screenshot the ingredients and the steps. If a recipe runs long, scroll and take a second or third screenshot. If you changed the serving size, leave it that way in the shot, because the amounts follow it.
4. Add each screenshot to the album as you go. Ten favorites takes about ten minutes.
5. Screenshot your current meal plan and grocery list too. It’s the part people forget, and it’s often the most useful: it’s what your family actually eats in a normal week.

Screenshots don’t expire. Even if you don’t pick a new app before October 21, you’ll still have everything.

Where to take them next

It depends on where you buy groceries.

If you shop at an Albertsons Companies store, Meals Hub in that store’s app has Mealime’s recipes. Tap More, then Meals Hub. Your own favorites list won’t be there, but your screenshots tell you which ones to look up.

If you shop anywhere else (Kroger, Walmart, Aldi, Target, a local grocer), Meals Hub is tied to stores you don’t use. Pick a meal planner that does three things: brings in recipes without retyping them, plans a week, and turns the week into one grocery list.

That’s the flow Kithful is built around, so here’s how it works there:

1. Go to Plan, then Recipes, then Scan a recipe.
2. Pick the screenshots from your album. One upload can hold several recipes, and a recipe that took two screenshots comes back as one recipe.
3. Check what it read. Amounts are kept exactly as written, and nothing is saved until you tap save.
4. Plan your week, then tap once to put every ingredient you don’t already have on the shared shopping list, sorted by aisle.

Kithful’s free plan includes 30 photo scans a month, and new households start with 14 days of unlimited scans, which is enough to bring a whole collection over at once. There’s more on the switch, including what Kithful doesn’t do, on our Mealime alternative page.

If you only do one thing

Make the album and screenshot your five most-cooked recipes tonight. It takes five minutes, and it means October 21 can’t take them with it.

What Kithful costs

Plan	What you get	Price
Free	Every feature, for the whole family. 30 photo/PDF scans a month; typing and pasting a text are unlimited.	$0, forever
Plus	Everything in Free, with unlimited scans. One price covers the household.	$39.99/year or $4.99/month

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Last updated 2026-10-07. Kithful isn’t affiliated with the apps named here; their names belong to their owners.