Also, sauces. 1 day making bolognese is 3 days of main courses.
Ideally you are only making 2 or 3 main courses during the week.
I was one of your early sign ups when you first announced on reddit. I came back this year and resumed my usage.
So, originally, I was a single guy looking to put on muscle. ETM works great for that! Like, super duper well. Baring a few issues.
But now, it isn't just me! And I can't get away with arguing "well the meal is nutritionally balanced."
So, from a wife acceptance factor, whole meals, more than 1 course.
Next, ETM gives wacko shopping amounts sometimes. I know that the math may work out, but 25 cups of spinach is too much. The amounts listed to buy are so far off reality that I am not going to trust the delivery option, which, well, totally sucks because that'd be nice. I think it had me buy 6 heads of lettuce one week.... I did. I ended the week with 4 heads of lettuce in my fridge.
For that matter, the entire UI around "original serving size, servings to make" is confusing as hell.
I should sign up for a new account to give a real FRE feedback, but the UI for existing users to configure meals and such is both absurdly powerful and also hard to manage in regards to "types of meals" and "meal plan". I totally get why the UI is how it is (except for why menus are where they are, separate topic) but I wouldn't ever suggest someone who isn't technically inclined, and also very dedicated, to even try to get started.
Which sort of sums up ETM: It is a power user's tool.
Oh and adding a recipe sucks. After doing one I gave up. I currently have a one note of "recipes from ETM except fixed so they taste like food." No offense (since I fit in this category) but a lot of the recipes are obviously written by gym bros to be as efficient as possible. Like, some of the recipes are easily transformed from meh to good by the addition of basic seasonings.
On the topic of recipes write some sort of import tool so I can point you at a website and you just scrap that shit. Or even let me paste it in and you parse it.
Even if I had to take the parsed results and verify each ingredient, it's be 10x better.
I need to be clear, I like ETM, it saves me a ton of money and makes meal planning easier, but if I didn't know how to cook, estimate amounts of food I need to buy, and if I wasn't able to on the fly figure out other courses for the meals, it would be far less useful to me.
But, as a tool for gym bros to meet their macros, bloody amazing. And gym bros will learn any UI if it promises gains, none of the other tools I use are exactly user friendly.
At the end of the day, if you had a slick onboarding process of "select 5 meals from NYT cooking that we legally slurped up because recipes have no copyright protection, and we'll ship you all the ingredients you need to cook them", well that's be an awesome product.
Oh and pay attention to when certain proteins are cooked. Buying $40 of fish on Sunday for Friday dinner is stupid. Either I freeze $40 of fish and hate you, or the fish goes to waste and I hate you. Both are shitty options.
I chose C, ignore the schedule and I cooked the Halibut on Monday.
Of course people would rather open an app and order some delicious fast food which arrives in about 20 minutes. It's not healthy but it wastes less time.