Meal Prep Agent: AI-Powered Weekly Meal Planning
I built a multi-agent system that turns dietary preferences into a full week of meals with organized shopping lists. Here's how it works.
Meal planning is tedious. Finding recipes, balancing nutrition, scaling portions, writing shopping lists—it takes longer than the actual cooking. I built the Meal Prep Agent to automate the entire process.
What It Does
You provide your preferences. The agent delivers a complete 7-day meal plan with an organized shopping list.
Inputs:
- Dietary restrictions (vegetarian, gluten-free, low-carb)
- Cuisine preferences (Italian, Asian, Mediterranean)
- Number of people
- Budget level (budget-friendly, moderate, premium)
- Favorite food blogs (optional)
Outputs:
- 7-day meal plan with breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks
- Shopping list organized by store section
- Quantity estimates for your household size
How It Works: Four Specialized Agents
The system uses a multi-agent workflow. Four AI specialists work in sequence, each building on the previous output.
| Agent | Role | What It Does |
|---|---|---|
| 🔍 Culinary Discovery | Trend Analyst | Discovers 3-5 trending recipes matching your preferences |
| 📚 Recipe Research | Curator | Gathers 8-10 recipes from your favorite food blogs |
| 📅 Meal Planning | Nutritionist | Creates a balanced 7-day plan from discovered recipes |
| 🛒 Shopping List | Coordinator | Organizes ingredients by store section, eliminates duplicates |
Each agent streams its output. You can watch the workflow progress as agents complete their tasks.
Under the Hood
- Model: GPT-4o-mini via Vercel AI SDK
- Streaming: Server-Sent Events (SSE) for live updates
- Architecture: Sequential agent pipeline with context passing
- i18n: Full support for English, Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese, French, and German
Budget targets for two people: $50-75/week (budget-friendly), $100-150/week (moderate), $200+/week (premium).
The entire process takes 2-3 minutes.
Try It
The Meal Prep Agent is live at /meal-prep.
Enter your preferences, hit generate, and watch four AI agents collaborate to plan your week.
Why I Built This
I like building things that save time on routine tasks. Meal planning was a weekly chore that took 30+ minutes of browsing recipes and making lists. Now it takes 3 minutes.
This was also an experiment in multi-agent workflows—coordinating specialized AI roles into a coherent pipeline. The patterns here apply to more complex agentic systems.
If you try it, let me know what you think.