How it works
From the fridge to the dinner table, in five small things WFD does that nobody else does.
Each step has a short clip — nothing plays on its own; tap one to watch.
1. Your library, with intelligence
You build your meal library by typing meal names. That’s it. Type “Spaghetti Bolognese” and WFD does the rest:
- A photo of the dish appears automatically (no more cartoon icons).
- A standard ingredient list fills in for you to edit.
- Step-by-step cooking instructions arrive when you tap Auto-pick.
The recipes you’ve handwritten over the years are protected. WFD never overwrites your notes, your photos, or your edits. It only fills in the gaps where you haven’t written anything yet.
2. Tell it what’s in the fridge
The headline feature: What do I have? Type or speak your ingredients — corn, chicken broth, eggs, whatever — and WFD shows you every meal in your library you can make, ranked by what’s closest to ready.
Found something promising but missing two items? Tap Add missing to list and they’re on your shopping list. From there, tap Send to Reminders and they’re synced to every device in your household.
3. Eat in or eat out — same flow
Some nights you cook. Some nights you go out. WFD treats both as first-class. Tap Eat In for a meal suggestion from your library. Tap Eat Out to find restaurants nearby filtered by distance, cuisine, price, and what your family actually likes (Yelp data baked in).
Restaurants get queued the same way meals do. Tonight’s pick can be either. Your week of planned dinners shows both kinds. The shopping list builds itself from the ones you’re cooking.
4. The family is built in
Add the people who eat with you. WFD knows who’s home tonight, who has a diet, who’s allergic to what, and who picked last. The suggestion engine respects all of it without you having to remember.
Shared households use CloudKit. When your spouse adds a meal on their iPhone, you see it on yours instantly. When the babysitter cooks something Tuesday night, the Apple Watch logs it in three taps with no app to open. No accounts. No sign-up. No data leaves your iCloud.
5. The cooking loop closes
The meal WFD picks is a meal you can actually cook. Every meal has cooking instructions. Tap Print Recipe to send it to the kitchen, AirDrop it to the iPad on the counter, save it to Notes for later. The “How to cook” card shows the first steps right on the suggestion screen — no second tap needed to see whether you can really make it tonight.
This is the part most meal planners forget. We don’t.