Mealime Is Shutting Down: The Best Mealime Alternative (Canadian, Too)

Mealime is closing: what exactly happens

Mealime announced on its website (mealime.com/closing) that the app will be discontinued as of October 21, 2026. In practice: no more Pro subscription fees effective immediately, the app stops working on that date, and all personal data is deleted when it shuts down. There is no export tool for your meal plans or your favourite recipes.

Why? Mealime was acquired by Albertsons Companies, one of the largest grocery groups in the United States. The group is consolidating its planning tools into “Meals Hub”, built into the apps of its store banners (Safeway, Albertsons, Vons, Jewel-Osco and others). That is the replacement it suggests. The catch, if you live in Canada, the UK or Australia: those stores do not exist where you shop. You would be planning dinner inside an American grocery chain’s app.

Two Canadian apps, two eras

Mealime was founded in Vancouver in 2013 by Maria Golikova and Jeffrey Bunn. The idea was simple and good: recipes ready in about 30 minutes, a personalized plan based on your dietary preferences, and a grocery list sorted by category. More than four million people signed up, many of them in Canada and the United States.

Olivi picks up the torch on the other side of the country. Designed in Montréal by Tangram HQ Studio, it starts from the same need, taking the chore out of “what are we eating this week?”, with today’s tools: Olive, an AI assistant that composes your weekly meal plan from your tastes, your budget and your own recipes, and a grocery list that builds itself, sorted by aisle and shared in real time. Data stays hosted in Canada.

Mealime vs Olivi: feature comparison

Here is what Mealime did well, and what Olivi does instead, often going a step further:

• Weekly plan. Mealime: you pick recipes from its catalogue using your filters. Olivi: Olive generates the whole week from your profile (allergies, diet, budget, time available), you swap a meal in one tap, and you can plan up to four weeks at once.
• Your own recipes. Mealime built its plans from its own catalogue; your family recipes were not the starting point. Olivi imports a recipe from any website, a PDF or a photo, deciphers a handwritten card and accepts a Paprika export. Your recipes become the base of your plan.
• Grocery list. Both generate it automatically by aisle. Olivi adds a list shared in real time through a simple link (the person doing the shopping needs no account), a one-handed shopping mode for the store, and autocomplete with the products of your country.
• Hands-free cooking mode. Mealime had it, Olivi does too: the screen stays on, steps show up large, timers are built in, and Olive answers your questions while you cook.
• Batch cooking. Not in Mealime. Olivi merges several recipes into one batch cooking walkthrough with its timers: one afternoon, a week of meals.
• Nutrition. Mealime kept it for Pro subscribers. Olivi shows nutrition facts per serving for every recipe, calculated from Health Canada’s official nutrient file, never made up.
• Language. Mealime was English only. Olivi is available in English (Canada, United States, United Kingdom, Australia), French, Spanish, German, Italian and Dutch, with the products and units of your country.
• Platforms. Mealime: iPhone and Android. Olivi: web app (olivi.ca), iPhone and iPad, and Android in beta, all synced automatically.
• Price. Mealime: free with a Pro subscription. Olivi: a free plan to start and a paid plan when you want more volume. No card required to try it.

How to save your Mealime recipes before October 21

Mealime offers no export, but you can rescue what matters in an evening. Here is the method we recommend:

• 1. Make a list of your favourite Mealime recipes (your favourites and the dishes you cook again and again).
• 2. If a recipe has a public web page, copy its address and paste it into Olivi’s URL import: the recipe is structured in seconds, in its original language, or translated if you turn on “Translate”.
• 3. Otherwise, take a screenshot of the recipe and scan it in Olivi: Olive reads the photo and rebuilds the ingredients and steps.
• 4. Got several recipes as text? Paste them all at once into “Paste several recipes”: Olivi splits them and saves them one by one.
• 5. Fill in your profile (allergies, diet, budget, equipment) and ask Olive to generate your first week. The grocery list follows automatically.

Why a Canadian alternative matters

Beyond hometown pride, there are practical reasons. Your data stays in Canada, on a platform deployed in the Montréal region and built with Quebec’s Law 25 and the GDPR in mind. Recipes and products reflect what you actually find at the store, in your own language and units, from Canadian classics to world cuisine. And the app is built by a small independent team, not by a grocery group that can decide overnight to close the service and bring you back into its own stores.

If you used Mealime for its simplicity, you will find the same promise in Olivi: quick dinners, a plan that makes itself and a list ready before you even think about it. You can use Olivi without downloading anything, straight from your browser, then install the iPhone or Android app whenever you like.