It's our last podcast episode of 2022! Let's go over some end-of-year stats and recap what happened for Plan to Eat in the past year. Thank you for listening this year! We appreciate you!
Top 10 imported websites:
Top 10 imported recipes:
Connect with all the PTE Podcast recipes here
Sign up for a free trial: plantoeat.com
Contact us: podcast@plantoeat.com
Connect with us:
Instagram
Facebook
Pinterest
It's our last podcast episode of 2022! Let's go over some end-of-year stats and recap what happened for Plan to Eat in the past year. Thank you for listening this year! We appreciate you!
Top 10 imported websites:
Top 10 imported recipes:
Connect with all the PTE Podcast recipes here
Sign up for a free trial: plantoeat.com
Contact us: podcast@plantoeat.com
Connect with us:
Instagram
Facebook
Pinterest
[00:00:00]
I'm Riley and I'm Roni. And this is the plan to eat podcast, where we have conversations about meal planning, food, and wellness. To help you answer the question what's for dinner.
Roni: Hello everyone. Welcome to the Plan to Eat Podcast. This is our last episode of 2022, and today we are gonna be going over some end of year recap for Plan to Eat, throwing some statistics at you and just talking about how the year went for us.
Riley: I hope that you guys find this information as interesting as we do. Um, and if you are a Plan to Eat customer who's been in it, uh, for a little or a long while, I think you will find it interesting.
Roni: We don't always talk about statistics up in these parts, but today that's kind of what we're all about. Uh, when it comes to the end of year and kind of like what our customers have been up to, uh, we find it really fun and interesting to just talk about. , you know, what were commonly imported [00:01:00] recipes, what recipe sites were the most popular for customers.
We'll include a lot of this information in the show notes of this re of this podcast so that, if there's any recipes or a blog that we talk about that you're really interested in, uh, you can just have head over to the show notes and um, click on those links there.
Riley: Well, let's jump right in. Um, these first few are some of my favorites because it's. The numbers are of such great magnitude , that it makes me really excited. So I won't tempt you anymore. I'll actually just tell you. So there were a total of 2.7 million recipes planned in 2022 planned.
Roni: That's awesome. That's a lot of meal plans created
Riley: Yes, that makes me so proud. , like, I'm so proud of people getting in there, making their menus, um, making their meal plans, and actually utilizing this tool for what it's meant to be, you know, which is a meal planner.
Roni: Yeah, I think that's awesome. And then our next big stat, [00:02:00] this one's the Big Mamma Jama. How many items have been added to your shopping list in 2022? So overall, everybody who uses Plan to eat 33.5 million items were added to the shopping list in 2022. That's incredible.
Riley: yeah, . And this includes things like trash bags down to one little knob of garlic , or knob of ginger, like, um, so yeah, I mean that. That number makes sense to be that gigantic. If people are planning as many recipes as they are, you know, and every recipe has, you know, a certain number of ingredients in it, then you know, the math makes sense.
But I hope that this has been saving everyone tons of money. I hope it's been saving everyone tons of time. Um, all the good things, but 33.3 million is just substantial.
Roni: I know it's awesome. So then our next one is how many hours were spent using Plan to Eat? And we had just under 200,000 hours in the year, 2022 of our customers [00:03:00] spend using Plan to eat, to create meal plans, to import recipes, make your shopping lists. Uh, I know Riley and I contributed to that this year, walking around the grocery store where they're shopping lists, opening the app to, you know, plan an recipe that sounds yummy.
All of those things.
Riley: Yeah. You know, it's amazing because that number, it doesn't really add up that fast. Everyone can go to their account and see how many hours they spent planning. , um, over the lifetime of their Plan to eat account. It's not broken down by year, but I just think about the times when I open it for like two minutes to go and add a recipe or to go add something to my shopping list.
Um, so that number like it's builds really slowly, because you know, when you have gotten into the habit of using the Plan to Eat Eat app or the Plan to Eat, you know, desktop. The things you do in there happen pretty quickly. Um, I'm gonna add catch up to my shopping list. Well, boom, it's done, you know, in 10 seconds and so, 200,000 hours.
Uh, again, it just makes me excited that people are actually using it. People are [00:04:00] actually planning. And all of these numbers just back that up because 200,000 hours and 2.7 million recipes planned and 33.5 million. Items on the shopping list, like people are using this and they're doing it. I, I just hope that all the benefits of Plan to Eat are coming to fruition in the lives of our customers.
Roni: And then our final, uh, big number stat that we have is how many total recipes were added into accounts. and that was also 2.7 million. So I don't know at this point the number of recipes that we have in our database. Overall, it's probably. You know, 25 million or something ridiculous.
But just in this year alone, 2.7 million new recipes were added into people's counts.
Riley: I wonder how often people are adding a recipe and immediately planning it
2.7 million is a general number for both of these two. It's like, you know, the closest whole number, and so I'm just, but I'm just wondering how often, uh, people are adding recipes and then planning them. I do that a pretty good bit, but I also have old [00:05:00] favorites, so the majority of my meal plan is not new recipe.
Roni: I would agree. I actually, I probably import more recipes into my account than I even ever put me recipes on my meal planner, because I find a lot of recipes online that. I love and eventually I wanna try 'em, but a lot of times they are, you know, like a holiday specific recipe or maybe just a really yummy dessert recipe or snack recipe that I don't like.
I don't need a recipe, I don't need a dessert recipe today, but you know, if I ever want some like, you know, triple chocolate moose or something, I wanna make sure it's in my plan to eat account so I can find it later.
Riley: Yeah, I am notorious about being drawn in by a photo on a recipe. Yes, this looks amazing. I can't wait to make it. This looks, oh, just so good. Um, and if I don't immediately add it to my planner, it unfortunately can go into the abyss of my recipe book. But I do add a lot of recipes, probably more than I plan.
Also, just based on , how good things look
Roni: I'll be honest, I have a lot [00:06:00] of recipes that draw me in because the picture looks so good, and then once I import it and actually look at the steps to make the recipe, I'm like, yeah, I'm never actually gonna make this.
Riley: Okay for having honesty time. I was on Facebook earlier and I saw this recipe and it looked amazing, and then I read the title and all the like things in it. I was like, yeah, nevermind. Like the, the ingredients and the combination of ingredients didn't actually sound that good to me, even though the photo was compelling, so I didn't import that one.
Roni: I mean, you know what you like, so I get it.
Riley: yeah. I'm, I am not a picky eater. I'm not afraid to branch out, but just for some reason today that just didn't hit, just didn't hit. So So the next, you know, bits of information that we have to share with you are the top imported websites for 2022. And this list, man, I think I, I wish that I had pulled up last year's roundup because [00:07:00] this list looks the same almost every year. And I, you know, that's not a bad thing. It actually tells me that these recipe sites are worth importing.
Roni: Totally. Yeah. So number one was all recipes. . That seems pretty standard to me. All recipes as literally anything that you could imagine. The next one is New York Times cooking. Number three, taste of Home. Number four, skinny Taste. Number five, food Network. Should we do the top 10?
Riley: Let's do top 10.
Roni: number six, eating well.com.
Number seven, half big harvest. Woo, woo, woo, woo,
Riley: one's not.
Roni: I'm surprised that one's not hire either, just from people on our team importing every single one of her recipes. number eight is delicious.com, number nine, budget bites and number 10, the kitchen.com.
Riley: And there are some really great ones, uh, further down on the list, some that I often import from. I know we just did the top 10, but I'm gonna read you a couple. Bon Appetit Spend with pennies. Sally's Baking, [00:08:00] addiction, love all of those. Um, I get so many recipes from Sally's baking addiction, and I ha I make them gluten free.
I, I, you know, I don't bake them as is. Um, but yeah, uh, she, everything, all of her photos are so good. That's why I import so much from her.
Roni: Yeah. All right. So the top day of the week for creating your meal plan is Monday or Sunday. They're kind of a tie, but interestingly enough, Friday is the slowest day for meal planning. We don't see very many people using the program on Fridays.
Riley: You know, I, you know, I'm gonna have an overgeneralization here, but I think by Friday nobody's meal planning They've already done it, you know, like the Friday for me. And we're actually recording this on a Friday. Friday for me is either it's leftovers eating out or the very last thing I planned that I put off until today,
Roni: very true.
Riley: for whatever reason.
Roni: Yeah. We often like save Friday night for going out to eat, which is kind of silly cuz everybody else also goes out to eat on Friday night. So it's like you always end up [00:09:00] waiting longer at a restaurant. But I think it just feels kind of good at the end of the week to be like, we're done with the work week, let's go and relax and not think about, not think about dinner.
We'll just have somebody else do it.
Riley: Yeah. And, and the work week includes cooking. You know, I, I, for me, yeah, eating out is just a man, I don't have the energy to cook, or I'm excited to go out to eat somewhere, be for whatever reason. Maybe it's with friends, maybe it's a new restaurant, but yeah, for sure. I the work week includes all the meal stuff too.
Roni: Yeah.
Riley: Do you meal plan on Sunday or on Monday
Roni: Well,
Riley: or Thursday? What? What day do you plan
Roni: You know, at this point my meal planning has become a little bit more fluid. I used to specifically meal plan on Mondays, like Monday morning, and then I would go grocery shopping Monday after work. But nowadays I basically just plan. A certain number of recipes on my meal plan.
Some weeks I plan four recipes on my meal plan. Some weeks I plan seven recipes and I just make the recipes. And then [00:10:00] when we're, when we're like getting close to finishing up all those recipes on the meal plan, I just make a new meal plan and go grocery shopping. It's become a little bit more fluid, a little less structured.
Um, and I think that's just because, right. we're not sure, like, are we going to a friend's house? You, I mean, like, you know, like being around the holidays, it's like, are we going to a friend's house for something? Are we, you know, we also have a lot of people who have birthdays in December, so it's like, are we going out for somebody's birthday?
Uh, I've tried to be just like a little more fluid with it. And also like really just utilizing, like coming home from the grocery store and putting a lot of things in the freezer. Um, so that way if, if we don't get to something, it also doesn't go bad. So it's definitely a little more fluid. Right.
Riley: Yeah. I tend to plan on Sunday nights, mostly because Sunday nights is when I'm doing my week overview. Do we have food? What are, what is on the agenda? , where, where do I have to be ? Where does anybody else in my family have to be? what kind of errands do I have to run?
I know I've [00:11:00] mentioned this on the podcast before, but I live quite a distance from the grocery store, and so I almost always lump it together with other errands. It's very rarely its own trip. And so I, I'll typically meal plan on Sunday nights and then, but I don't ever grocery shop until Monday or Tuesday.
Um, incredibly rarely would I go to the grocery store on Sunday. So, and I, I lumped that together like, planning and shopping, like those kind of go. I'll like plan it. Then the next day we'll shop or something like that.
Roni: Yeah. Right. Yeah. It's very rare. Oh, well, most of the time I, it's the same day that I create a meal plan, I go to the grocery store. Well, and it's particularly right now, like it's because I look in my refrigerator and I'm like, mm. Need to make a meal plan and also go to the grocery store today.
Next up we have. The top number of recipes one account added in 2022. So one person added this many recipes to their account in 20 22, 20 22. That number is 8,797 recipes. [00:12:00] So one person imported almost 9,000 recipes into their account in one year.
I literally can't believe that. That's in crazy.
Riley: no, I can't either that, I mean, that is work. I mean, like that is somebody doing some work, like they spend some time. That's amazing.
Roni: I'm gonna just go out here on a limb and make an assumption that this person maybe imported a bulk file of recipes that it hopefully included at least 3000 of those recipes because otherwise they were clicking that recipe clipper a lot,
Riley: Yeah. So just to give some perspective to somebody, maybe you're listening and you don't actually use plant to eat, or you're very new, um, shoot, maybe you're not new and you only have 200 recipes in your book, in your recipe book. That's normal.
Roni: Yeah,
Riley: I have used plan to eat for eight years, and I have 2200 recipes.
2200. That is nowhere near 9,000.
Roni: right. Yeah. I've used plan to eat for four years and I have 1200 recipes in my account, which I [00:13:00] thought was a lot.
Riley: Yeah,
Roni: Because like we said, a lot of those recipes, I'm like, I just import 'em cuz they look yummy
Riley: yeah, yeah. Anything that customer, um, could possibly want to eat has been added to their account. I
Roni: Oh yeah. I am so impressed.
Riley: for anyone listening.
And in fact for myself, it's really interesting, um, just the comparison of how many they've added. And, uh, yeah, I would love to take a look at their recipe book and see what kind of yummy stuff they've got.
Roni: Yeah,
Riley: but then I'll hoard 'em and then I won't actually make 'em so , I just stick to old, old, you know, like we're really bad about ha you know, just habitual eating and like, cuz we make the same recipes all the time cuz we like 'em and I really try to branch out, but sometimes that disappoints me.
Roni: right? Yeah.
Riley: Next up is tags. Tags is one of my favorite features of plan to eat. Uh, it allows you to take a recipe, and add a tag, uh, for anything that you might need a tag for. Um, so think holidays or, uh, eating type like gluten-free, dairy free, soy-free, egg-free, et [00:14:00] cetera. , um, or in my case I even have a tag for recipes we love or favorites, um, or a family member's favorites, maybe.
All of 'em are tagged with my daughter's name, so I know these are favorites. So that's what tags are and it allows you to easily search your recipe book so that you can find these recipes when you want them. So we have a list of the top tags inside of Plan to Eat.
Roni: All right number. Easy. I think that that was definitely in the top five last year too. If not also the number one. Yeah.
Riley: Well, we just talked about how cooking and eating is the, it's part of the work week. So like if you can make that easier. Yeah. I'm.
Roni: totally. Okay. Number two, vegetarian. Number three, vegan. Number four. Gluten free. Number five, keto. Six. Healthy seven. Chicken eight. Dessert. Nine. Imported. 10 Breakfast.
Riley: All right. I have questions about imported,
Roni: I have questions about imported
Riley: fantastic [00:15:00] list.
Roni: Yeah. I have questions about imported as well. A couple other honorable mentions on here are instant pot crock pot paleo, summer pasta, quick. , I, tags are an awesome feature. I use them a lot. Um, in a similar way that Riley said. It's just kind of like a extra level of organization in your recipe book to be able to find the recipes that you know you're gonna want to eat and use.
I really like to tag my recipes with my husband's name so that I know that it was recipe that he really loved. And then I think we've talked about this, I think we even talked about this last week. During one month of 2022, my husband and I did, um, like a month of paleo eating. And so I was able to import a bunch of paleo recipes and then tag 'em paleo.
Riley: As a note for listeners, these are completely customizable so your tags could look, comple will look completely different than somebody else's tags. We have some standard in there that you can use. But for the most part, these are completely up to you what they [00:16:00] are. So it's fun to see that people are using, you know, similar phrases and similar things.
Like there's a definitely a sense of, um, here's what we're going, here's what we're working for right now, across, across our customer bases easy. And that's number one.
Roni: Yeah, for sure. All right, so next up we have our top imported recipes. This is a section Riley and I always really love to talk about cuz we just love recipes. Right.
Riley: and it's so surprising what's in the
Roni: it's so, so fra. Honestly, it kind of blows my mind. So number one is an all recipes recipe that's called World's Best Lasagna. If you listen to our recap last year, and if you watched our YouTube video recap from two years ago, You'll know this was the number one recipe for both of those years as well.
I don't know how many years in a row this recipe has been the number one imported recipe, but World's Best Lasagna is apparently the world's best lasagna because people love to import it into [00:17:00] their plan to eat accounts.
Riley: Okay. But I just don't, I mean, wait, I know for a fact that we talked about this a couple of years ago, but do, how often do you eat lasagna in a year?
Roni: Okay. I think that, I think this last year, because we talked about this lasagna recipes. I think I made lasagna last January, and that was the only time during the year that I made lasagna.
Riley: I made freezer lasagna like to go and like store it in my freezer and I haven't eaten it yet.
Roni: Oh, no.
Riley: Let me, let me give everyone some, like, just frame of reference for these numbers. So going back to tags, um, easy recipes were tagged with easy 40,000 times. Vegetarian was tagged 36,000 times vegan, 27,000 gluten-free. 21,000 keto. 21,000. Okay. So with these top imported recipes, it, this lasagna was imported 400 times.
So while it has been the top for years running, it's, it's not like every customer of ours is importing lasagna.[00:18:00]
I think it's worth mentioning so people understand but. I've gotta try this world's best on you this year.
Roni: I'm pretty sure. I don't know if I tried this specific lasagna recipe this last year or if I just tried, or if I just made a lasagna recipe. I don't know, but this next recipe on the list. So the next, so number two on the list is from Natasha's Kitchen. It's a meatloaf recipe. I definitely have this recipe in my account and I've made it, and it is a really good meatloaf recipe.
Just looking at the pictures on the website, I'm like, oh, yeah, I definitely have this recipe in my account. uh, number three is a banana bread recipe from simply recipes number four. a classic shepherd's pie recipe from the wholesome dish. And number five is also from the wholesome, wholesome dish.
The best classic chili number six half baked harvest, one of Riley's and My favorites. Um, a chicken taziki Bowl seven. Give me some oven fried rice recipe number eight, the chunky chef, [00:19:00] family favorite baked mac and cheese. That sounds really. number nine, all recipes, good old fashioned pancakes. I think that was on our rest on our list last year too, actually.
Number 10 is from eating well.com chicken and spinach Skillet pasta with lemon and Parmesan.
Riley: For Honorable mention number 11 is half baked harvest chicken euros with feta taziki, and I think it's interesting that she has two recipes on our top list that have her Taki or Taki sauce in it. It must be amazing.
Roni: I, yeah, I actually don't know if I have any of her if I've imported or at least made any of her recipes that have, uh, her taziki recipe in it. Um, but I do wanna mention that in the top 25 imported recipes, she has seven on the list. So,
Riley: yeah.
Roni: She was pretty popular this year. Once again, that was probably mostly from the plan to eat team importing all of her recipes because we really love her.
Riley: Yes. So if you're listening half baked Harvest, we'd love to, uh, work [00:20:00] with you
Roni: Yeah.
Riley: That's a wrap on our stats related to recipes and planning and tags. We think it's really fun and we hope that you think so too. We're excited to talk about some other stuff that's been happening with Plan to Eat.
Roni: Yeah, so I think one of the most important things this year was that we hired an additional software developer. She is also our graphic designer. Her name is Jess, and we are really excited to add her to the team. She is the sixth member of the Plan to Eat team, so, , we are now a small but mighty team of six, and that's pretty cool.
Uh, when I first started working for Plan to Eat, it was just me and Riley and Clint, our founder. And the three of us were trying to do all the things all the time. And, you know, adding to the team has been really awesome for everybody. And, we hope that you guys have noticed that we've been doing some things since we've hired some new people.
Riley: Yeah. It's worth mentioning that our customers make this possible for us to have grown. [00:21:00] Have, we certainly have a need to grow cuz we all, are, you know, we all have such unique roles now at Plan to Eat. Uh, you know, a long time ago everybody did everything, uh, because, when you're a really small team, that's what you do.
And so now we all have these unique roles and so thank you to our customers. Thank you for, using Plan to Eat and thank you for being loyal customers and for making it possible for us to grow and make the product better and better.
Roni: And if you've seen any of our, new like graphics on, you know, Instagram or Facebook, any of the, the new designs that we have this year, those are all from Jess. She's an incredible illustrator and we've been really lucky to have her, uh, join our team, not only for development, but also creating some awesome designs for us.
Riley: Uh, so another thing that we implemented this year because of our growing team is a team fun meeting. And maybe that sounds silly to everyone listening, but it's important that we, I don't know, get to know each other, hang out a little bit. Most of us are remote, um, so we don't do a lot of in-person anything.[00:22:00]
Uh, but we have implemented, a team fund meeting. We have weekly meetings as a whole team. Um, and so during our fun meetings, which is only once a month, uh, we've done a lot of different stuff. We've gone bowling lots of times, so keep an eye out for Plan to Eat, bowling t-shirts. We're getting really. We've gone hiking.
We toured a local dairy. Uh, we actually toured a chocolate, uh, a cus, a craft chocolate company, Dar Chocolate, which is located here in Colorado. Um, and we interviewed the owner of Dar Chocolate Gela, on an episode a few months ago. Ronnie probably knows the episode number
Roni: It was episode 42. Um, it came out at the end of November.
Riley: So check that out. I knew you would know. Check that out was a great episode. And buy their chocolate. It is amazing. And then most recently we had a very low key day at the office, uh, watching the office.
Roni: we are all, um, Fans of the TV show, the Office, and so we were just like, what better thing to do on a [00:23:00] chili December morning than to hang out, eat snacks, and watch our favorite TV show, All right, next up. You may have noticed that we recently made an update to our mobile app planner. Um, we kinda changed the design of the mobile app planner and we are really excited for this update because it makes room for some additional features that we're gonna be launching to the app in 2023.
Some of those being drag and drop meal planning on the mobile app. So you'll actually be able to, you know, press and hold onto an item and move it up and down on your meal plan to be able to, you know, reschedule things and stuff on your meal plan. We're also gonna add, um, bulk recipe editing on the meal planner.
So similar on the website, we have what's called edit plan. Now it allows you to copy and swap and move and delete things on your meal plan kind of in bulk. So you could select multiple days, you could switch 'em to a different day, you could duplicate that whole meal plan, that kind of stuff. We're gonna be adding that to the [00:24:00] app next year.
And then we're also gonna add the option to reveal nutritional data on the app planner. , just like on the website right now, you can select to show certain nutritional data on each individual recipe. And each day we're gonna add the option to be able to reveal that on the app planner as well, so that if you are focused on looking at the nutrition, um, nutritional data of your recipes, you'll be able to see that on the go on your app as well.
Riley: we hope you're looking forward to all these updates. Uh, we can't wait, to get them into your hands into the mobile app. We're also really excited about all that we have planned for the podcast in 2023. Um, we've actually been doing a lot of work on our end and have tons of interviews already recorded, um, which means we can be extra excited about 'em because we've already interviewed these people.
Um, but you can be looking out for an interview with Eat Well Exchange, Ellie Gadient of Niman Ranch, Kristen Saxena, and her upcoming book, the Happier Meal. How to Enjoy Your Food and Your Kid .
Roni: We will also have Lei Shishak [00:25:00] on the podcast. She has a vegan and plant-based eating cookbook. Um, we're gonna have cooking tips from a professional chef Meera Keshav. And then we're also gonna, me and Riley are gonna be giving you some meal planning tips as usual, but we're really excited for what's coming up in the podcast in 2023, and we hope you guys will continue to listen. But just as a note, we are not gonna be having a podcast episode next week on December 28th, 2022. Um, the whole company is taking a holiday break that week, so we will be just off of work completely. So we are not, we are also not gonna have a podcast that week. And then starting in 2023, we are gonna go back to an every other week podcast schedule.
That'll at least happen for the first half of the year, and we'll see what happens after that. But, um, we just kind of needed to do that for our own timing of things. So we hope you guys will continue to listen, even though we're going back to every other week.
Riley: Thanks again so much for listening [00:26:00] to the Plan to Eat Podcast this year. Thanks for helping support us. You listening means the world to me and Roni. We can't even, uh, we're both just, uh, so grateful to be able to get to do this. Um, and so thank you so much for listening. We hope that you find this valuable. And we value you.
Roni: Thanks for listening, and we will see you guys in 2023.