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What's New & Coming Soon

See what has been added to MealCrew and get a peek at what we're building next.

CURRENT VERSION
v1.1.1.98.0
Family Schedule Privacy Released 2026-09-22

Recent Changes

The quick version. The full history is below.

📅
Connected Calendars

Connect a Google Calendar to MealCrew as a private, read-only calendar source, choose which Google calendars to show and who in the family can see them, and view imported events alongside MealCrew events throughout the app.

🧹
Chores & Rewards

Households can now create recurring or one-time chores, either assigned to a family member or left Up for Grabs for anyone to claim, with optional guardian approval before a reward is earned. A Reward Catalog lets families redeem points or money, the Family Wallet tracks each member's balance, and an optional points-to-money conversion is available. Chores & Rewards administration remains guardian-only.

🎨
Personal Accent Colors

Choose your own MealCrew icon accent color in My Account. Your choice follows your account across devices. Color pickers on iPhone and iPad were also fixed across My Account and Family custom colors.

🌐
Connect with MealCrew

Visit our new Connect page for Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok links. Facebook Community is Coming Soon. Find Connect in the desktop and mobile menus, footer, and Help Center.

⏰
Meal Prep Reminders

Planned meals can now have multiple defrost, prep, cooking, or custom reminders with one or more family recipients, and Today meal cards open meal management directly from Home.

📅
Calendar, Home & Push Fixes

Family events now appear on Home, mobile Month can add events, Calendar remembers its view, and Android push requests immediate delivery.

September 20, 2026

📅

Connected Calendars

Bring selected Google Calendar events into MealCrew alongside your family schedule and meal plans.

✓ Connect a Google account from My Account and choose which calendars you want MealCrew to display.
✓ Imported Google Calendar events appear alongside MealCrew family events while remaining clearly identified as external events.
✓ Calendar access is read-only: MealCrew does not create, modify, or delete events in your Google Calendar.
✓ Calendar sharing is private by default, with explicit controls for sharing selected calendars with your MealCrew family.
✓ Automatic background syncing keeps authorized Google Calendar events up to date in MealCrew.

September 19, 2026

🧹

Chores & Rewards

Families can manage chores, rewards, points, and a parent-held virtual family wallet together in MealCrew.

✓ Create recurring or one-time chores assigned to a family member or left Up for Grabs.
✓ Optional guardian approval controls when completed chores earn their rewards.
✓ The Reward Catalog supports points and money rewards with a redemption workflow.
✓ Family Wallet tracks each member's points and money balance with reason and history.
✓ Optional points-to-money conversion is available while Chores & Rewards administration remains guardian-only.

September 13, 2026

🌐

Connect with MealCrew

Find MealCrew's social channels together on the new public Connect page.

✓ Follow MealCrew on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok through links that open in a new tab.
✓ Facebook Community is shown as Coming Soon, with no active link.
✓ Open Connect from the desktop CREW menu, mobile Family & App menu, shared footer, or Help Center.

September 10, 2026

📅

Calendar Experience & Customization

MealCrew's Calendar is easier to use on phones, more personal for each family, and cleaner to print.

✓ Month view now stays a true seven-column calendar on mobile instead of collapsing into a long stacked list.
✓ Calendar navigation is more compact and stays useful while scrolling on mobile.
✓ Family Events use assigned family-member colors, including split-color cards when multiple people are assigned.
✓ Families can choose their own Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner Calendar colors from Family Settings.
✓ Calendar printing now preserves busy-day content and removes app-only navigation and STAGING chrome.

September 10, 2026

⏰

Cooking & Meal Reminders

Cooking reminders now run through MealCrew's unified notification engine with safer scheduling and easier defaults.

✓ Cooking & Meal Reminders now use the shared notification scheduler and delivery pipeline instead of the legacy standalone reminder worker.
✓ Editing, moving, swapping, removing, or reassigning a meal cancels stale pending reminders so the current meal details can be scheduled cleanly.
✓ Reminder dedupe includes the meal occurrence, cook, and due time so unchanged scans stay idempotent while legitimate reschedules can create a new reminder.
✓ New meal details default to 8:00 AM for Breakfast, 12:00 PM for Lunch, and 5:00 PM for Dinner, with a one-hour reminder default.
✓ Test Notification now gives persistent immediate feedback and suppresses repeated submits while the test is pending.
🔔

Notification Expansion

Meal Requests and family membership activity now use MealCrew's unified notification engine.

✓ Meal Request submissions notify the appropriate family admins, while approve, move, and decline decisions notify the original requester through the unified engine.
✓ Family welcome and new-member notifications now use the same preference-aware delivery pipeline instead of direct email sending.
✓ Deterministic dedupe keys prevent repeated trigger processing from creating duplicate logical notifications.
✓ Email preferences are applied at delivery time, and the events are ready for future Push delivery once native mobile token registration is available.
✓ Pending Family Requests received a compact desktop action layout so Approve, Move Date, and Decline are easier to scan and use.

September 9, 2026

🔔

Unified Notifications & Family Event Reminders

MealCrew now has one notification foundation for configurable reminders, delivery tracking, and future Push + Email expansion.

✓ Added per-user notification preferences in My Account with independent Email and future Push controls by notification type.
✓ Family Event Reminders are wired end-to-end through the unified notification engine with configurable lead times.
✓ Reminder scheduling is recurrence-aware, deduplicated, and safely canceled/rescheduled when Family Schedule events are edited or deleted.
✓ Added notification delivery-attempt tracking, device-token infrastructure, and a worker that processes due notifications.
✓ Push remains safely unavailable until Firebase and native mobile token registration are configured; the interface clearly labels it Coming Soon.
✓ Added a self-service Test Notification action and capability-aware messaging so STAGING never implies that disabled delivery occurred.
✓ Production delivery was verified with a real Family Event Reminder email after the guarded v1.1.1.84.0 promotion.
🧰

Family Schedule, Help & Ingredient Library Polish

The notifications release also closes several acceptance and documentation issues found during final testing.

✓ Family Schedule edit/detail actions now use consistent alignment and MealCrew's custom delete confirmation instead of the browser's native confirm dialog.
✓ Changing an event start date keeps a same-day end date synchronized, and new timed events default to 5:00 PM–6:00 PM with the end following start-time changes until manually overridden.
✓ Corrected Help guidance for recipe-photo limits, Top 10 privacy, Ingredient Library syncing, Meal Request permissions, email verification, and password reset behavior.
✓ Fixed Ingredient Library's Unused and Used Once filters so they now actually filter by recipe usage count.
✓ Final authoritative disposable regression passed 1850/1850 with 0 failures and 0 errors.

September 8, 2026

📅

Family Schedule & Combined Calendar

Family activities now live alongside meals so MealCrew can connect what the family is doing with what the family is eating.

✓ Create, view, edit, and delete family events with dates, times, all-day support, categories, locations, notes, and household-member assignment.
✓ Recurring events support daily, weekly, every few weeks, selected weekdays, and monthly schedules with recurrence end dates.
✓ Calendar combines scheduled meals and Family Schedule events while keeping independent Meals and Family Events filters.
✓ Family Schedule remains the event-management surface while Calendar provides the combined visual view.
✓ Event categories provide quick visual distinction while meals remain visually prominent.
🍽️

Faster Calendar & Pick Meal Experience

Planning a meal or adding an activity from Calendar now takes fewer steps.

✓ Calendar days include an Add Event shortcut that starts a Family Schedule event with the selected date already filled in.
✓ Pick Meal uses responsive cards designed for both desktop and mobile.
✓ All, Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner filters update immediately without reloading the page.
✓ Live search preserves the active meal-period filter.
✓ Eater assignment defaults to the family and expands only when you need to choose specific household members.
✓ Follow-up reliability work keeps filters, eater controls, conflict handling, and Add Meal working correctly after live-search results refresh.
📍

Smarter Family Schedule Locations

Event locations can now use real-place suggestions and open the exact destination in Google Maps.

✓ Start typing a location to see matching Google Places suggestions.
✓ Selecting a place saves its friendly name and formatted address.
✓ MealCrew keeps the selected Google Place information so Open in Google Maps can target the exact destination.
✓ Manual location text still works when you do not want or cannot find a suggested place.
✓ Editing selected location text safely falls back to the manual location instead of keeping stale place information.
✉️

Verification Email Protection

MealCrew now prevents repeated verification emails from being sent too quickly.

✓ Verification resends are protected by a five-minute cooldown.
✓ The original verification email after signup still sends immediately.
✓ Changing an account email address can still trigger its new verification email immediately.
✓ A failed email-delivery attempt can be retried without waiting for the cooldown.
✓ Existing additional request-rate protection remains in place.

August 24–28, 2026

📚

295 MealCrew Recipes

MealCrew now includes a complete built-in starter library with 295 recipes ready from day one.

✓ Browse 50 Breakfast, 100 Lunch, and 145 Dinner recipes.
✓ MealCrew recipes include ingredients, instructions, meal categories, and polished recipe presentation.
✓ Copy any MealCrew recipe into your family's own editable recipe library.
✓ The built-in collection gives new families plenty to explore without requiring them to create every recipe themselves.
✓ Community Recipes remain the growing shared library alongside MealCrew's curated collection.
⭐

Ratings Across MealCrew Recipes

Official MealCrew and approved Community recipes now have their own ratings and favorites.

✓ Rate and favorite shared recipes directly while browsing.
✓ See MealCrew-wide recipe ratings while discovering new meals.
✓ A recipe copied into your family keeps its own independent household rating and favorite state.
✓ Your changes to a copied recipe never modify the original shared recipe.
🏆

Smarter Top 10 Recipe Discovery

Top 10 now does a better job finding recipes families genuinely love and make.

✓ Ratings are an important part of what helps great recipes rise.
✓ Recipes made by more families receive stronger real-world validation.
✓ Favorites and repeat cooking help reinforce recipes people keep coming back to.
✓ Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner and Week, Month, All Time leaderboard views remain available.
📅

Better Mobile Calendar

Meal planning from a phone is easier with touch-friendly meal movement and smarter Calendar positioning.

✓ Opening Calendar focuses on today's date.
✓ Switching between Week and Month returns you to the current period.
✓ Long-press a scheduled meal on mobile and drag it to another date.
✓ Drop onto an empty slot to move the meal and leave the original day empty.
✓ Drop onto another scheduled meal to swap them.
✓ Calendar actions preserve your position so you do not unexpectedly jump around the page.
🏷️

More Flexible Recipe Libraries

MealCrew can organize more than just traditional Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner recipes.

✓ Added Recipe Type choices for Main Dish, Side Dish, Sauce / Condiment, Snack, Dessert, Appetizer / Dip, Drink, and Other.
✓ Full Recipes can live in your Recipe Library without being assigned to a meal period.
✓ Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner categories still make recipes easy to find when planning meals.
🌎

More Ways to Discover Recipes

MealCrew's recipe experience now brings your own recipes, friends, the Community, and MealCrew's built-in collection together.

✓ Browse your family's private recipe library.
✓ Discover recipes shared by connected families.
✓ Explore approved Community recipes shared across MealCrew.
✓ Browse MealCrew's curated built-in recipe collection.
✓ Copy recipes you like into your own editable family library.

August 22–23, 2026

🔑

Google Sign-In

MealCrew now supports a faster Google-powered sign-in and signup experience.

✓ Continue with Google is available from login and signup.
✓ Google-backed accounts are treated as email-verified after Google identity verification.
✓ The production Android app uses the same working Google Sign-In flow.
👥

Connected Family Homes

Connected families now have a richer, privacy-safe Home instead of a thin sharing page.

✓ Meet the Crew shows family members with display names and profile pictures.
✓ Shared recipe previews include recipe imagery and direct navigation.
✓ Coming Up highlights shared dinners and Family Meal Plan opens around today's date.
✓ Private household information such as usernames, pantry, shopping, requests, activity, and settings stays private.
🛡️

Safer Community Recipe Sharing

Community recipe publishing now includes a review flow while keeping owner control clear.

✓ Recipes submitted to the MealCrew community can be reviewed before appearing in public discovery.
✓ Owners can see review status and resubmit a rejected recipe after making changes.
✓ Friends-only and private recipe sharing remain separate from Community publishing.
📈

Popular on MealCrew Upgrades

Top 10 now makes it easier to see what families are actually making.

✓ Switch between Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner leaderboards.
✓ View Week, Month, or All Time popularity windows.
✓ Community visibility continues to respect recipe-sharing and privacy rules.
✉️

Verified Accounts & Recovery

Account verification and recovery are now part of the normal MealCrew experience.

✓ New email/password accounts can verify their email address.
✓ Forgot-password and reset-password flows help users recover access.
✓ Google Sign-In provides a verified identity path for Google-backed accounts.

August 15, 2026

⚡

Live Search & Filters Across MealCrew

Finding what you need now feels immediate across the app, not just in Recipes.

✓ Ingredient Library filters and search now refresh as soon as you choose or type.
✓ Pantry and Shopping now include live search, while Shopping meal filters update without a full page jump.
✓ What Can I Make updates matches immediately when Meal, Maximum Missing Ingredients, or Sort changes.
✓ Meal pickers, meal Ideas, and connected-family shared recipes now use the same live filtering behavior.
✓ Search waits for a short typing pause before refreshing so the server is not hit on every keystroke.
🧹

Cleaner Recipe Browsing

Recipes keeps its powerful filters without making you scroll through a wall of controls before seeing your meals.

✓ Removed the redundant global Breakfast / Lunch / Dinner navigation bar from the Recipes screen.
✓ Moved recipe search to the top and kept the everyday meal-period and Recipe / Quick Meal controls immediately visible.
✓ Moved Sharing, Family Rating, Tags, Recipe Readiness, Completion Time, and Last Made into an expandable More Filters panel.
✓ Active advanced filters appear as removable chips, with a one-tap Clear advanced filters action.
✓ Collapsed bulk Community Sharing controls into a compact settings section so normal recipe browsing starts closer to the actual recipes.
✓ All of the cleaned-up controls continue using the live-filter behavior added in v1.0.40.
🌎

Community Recipes & Recipe Discovery

Recipes is now the central place to discover meals from your family, friends, and the wider MealCrew community.

✓ Added My Recipes, Friends' Recipes, Community Recipes, and All Recipes views.
✓ Shared recipes identify the owning family and can be viewed or copied without allowing anyone to edit the owner's original.
✓ Copied recipes become independent editable copies in your own family library and start community-private.
✓ Families control friend sharing and community sharing independently, including per-recipe and bulk community-sharing controls.
✓ Added owner-aware search, true viewport centering on desktop, and a friendly Community Recipes invitation when no shared meals are available.
🚀

Getting Started & Onboarding

New and existing families now have an optional, progress-aware path to their first useful MealCrew setup.

✓ Added an optional Getting Started offer with Get Started, Maybe Later, and No Thanks choices.
✓ Getting Started follows real household progress instead of using a separate tutorial.
✓ Families are guided to add a meal and schedule their first Breakfast, Lunch, or Dinner using the real MealCrew workflow.
✓ A compact progress experience follows active onboarding and disappears when onboarding is finished or dismissed.
✓ Returning-user and existing-user behavior was regression-tested so onboarding does not become a permanent interruption.
✓ Fixed first-login behavior so brand-new accounts see the welcome choice before Getting Started begins instead of being silently auto-enrolled.
🤖

Android App Milestone

MealCrew completed its core Android conversion and first signed Android release build.

✓ Completed the Trusted Web Activity Android wrapper and permanent MealCrew Android app identity.
✓ Verified Digital Asset Links so the Android app can trust the MealCrew HTTPS domain.
✓ Produced signed APK and Android App Bundle release builds and verified the installed app launches without persistent browser chrome.
✓ Verified external HTTP-to-HTTPS behavior and HSTS as part of Android/app-readiness hardening.
🧪

Safer Staging & Release Testing

MealCrew now has an isolated staging environment for testing risky changes before they reach families.

✓ Staging uses separate app data and a prominent visual banner so it cannot be confused with production.
✓ Signup and onboarding test helpers allow first-run and returning-user flows to be exercised repeatedly without changing production behavior.
✓ Community Recipe copying and Quick Meal sharing regressions were caught and fixed during staging validation before production release.
📈

Activation & Retention Analytics

MealCrew can now measure whether families actually activate, return, and use the product instead of relying on simple visit counts.

✓ Added activated-family and activation-rate reporting.
✓ Added exact tracked 7-day retention and repeat-user measurements based on authenticated daily activity.
✓ Added family-level feature adoption across Calendar, Recipes, Quick Meals, Pantry, Shopping Cart, Meal Planner, Requests, and Ratings/Favorites.
✓ Added verified-email coverage and active-user windows for operational visibility.

August 14, 2026

📱

App-Ready Mobile & PWA Foundation

MealCrew received the core installable-app, mobile-navigation, offline, and device-readiness work needed for Android.

✓ Finalized the PWA manifest, production and maskable app icons, and installed-app presentation.
✓ Added touch-target and responsive mobile polish across navigation, forms, calendar, and meal cards.
✓ Verified standalone behavior and native Android Back navigation across phone, Fold, and tablet-style layouts.
✓ Added conservative service-worker support, a branded offline page, and network reconnect status without caching private family pages.
🔐

Verified Accounts, Recovery & Deep Links

Account security and externally opened MealCrew links were hardened for a hosted public product.

✓ New public signups now verify email before first sign-in, with resend support and duplicate-email protection.
✓ Added privacy-safe Forgot Password and time-limited single-use reset links.
✓ Hardened verification, reset, and family-invite deep links around the canonical MealCrew HTTPS address.
✓ Added self-service account deletion and safe family ownership transfer.
🍽️

Calendar Quick Add, Cooking & Reminders

Calendar planning became faster and scheduled meals gained real household cooking context.

✓ Calendar slots can pick an existing meal, type a one-time meal, or create and immediately schedule a new Quick Meal or Recipe.
✓ Scheduled meals can be assigned to a household cook with an optional meal time.
✓ Cook reminders support flexible lead times from 1 minute through 24 hours.
✓ Move, Copy, and Swap preserve occurrence-level cooking and reminder details.
🛟

Mobile Forms, Recovery & Launch Polish

Forms and installed-app startup became more resilient and more comfortable on phones.

✓ Recipe and Quick Meal forms preserve entered details when validation fails.
✓ Added mobile keyboard, autofill, capitalization, and Enter-key hints where useful.
✓ Added session-local draft recovery to higher-value forms while excluding passwords, uploads, hidden fields, and security values.
✓ Added a MealCrew-branded installed-app launch experience that appears once per browser session.
📜

Privacy, Terms & Public-App Readiness

MealCrew added the public policy and account controls expected of a hosted family app.

✓ Added public Privacy Policy and Terms of Service pages linked from the global footer.
✓ Documented account/family data, uploads, analytics, deletion behavior, security practices, acceptable use, and service availability.
✓ Completed key app-readiness checks around account deletion, permissions, external links, and installed-device behavior.

August 13, 2026

🔓

Flexible Meal Scheduling

Meal categories now organize suggestions instead of restricting manual calendar choices.

✓ Pick a Meal defaults to the selected meal category but now includes an All Meals view.
✓ Any saved meal can be manually scheduled into any Breakfast, Lunch, or Dinner slot.
✓ Calendar Move, Copy, and Swap now work across meal periods without category warnings.
✓ Meal Requests can choose any saved meal regardless of its normal category.
✓ Recipe categories still guide Surprise Me and automatic meal-plan generation so recommendations remain sensible.
✓ Scheduling a meal outside its normal category does not change or duplicate the recipe.
💬

Contact & Feedback

Testers can now reach the MealCrew team directly from inside the app.

✓ Added Bug Report, Feature Request, Question, and Other feedback types.
✓ Messages are sent directly to the MealCrew feedback inbox through the existing private email configuration.
✓ Feedback automatically includes the tester's account identity, MealCrew version, source page, submission time, and browser/device information.
✓ If the tester has an account email, replies from the feedback inbox can go directly back to them through Reply-To.
✓ Added basic per-user throttling to prevent the feedback form from being abused.
✓ Added Contact & Feedback to desktop navigation, the mobile menu, and Help.
🔥

Top 10 on MealCrew

The Recipe Library now has a live site-wide leaderboard showing what families are actually making.

✓ Popularity uses completed meal history only; future scheduled meals do not count.
✓ Only meals whose source recipe still exists and is currently shared are eligible for the site-wide leaderboard.
✓ Ranking favors meals used by more distinct families, with total completed uses breaking ties.
✓ The leaderboard never shows family identities or exact family counts.
✓ Single-household meal names remain private to that household until another household independently uses the same normalized meal name.
✓ Meals already in your own library are marked and link directly to your recipe.
✓ Desktop uses a right-side panel and mobile stacks the leaderboard below the Recipe Library.
⇄

Calendar Copy & Swap

Scheduled meals can now be copied or swapped directly from the calendar on desktop and mobile.

✓ Tap a scheduled meal and choose Copy Meal to duplicate it to another calendar slot while keeping the original.
✓ Tap Swap Meals and then another scheduled meal to exchange their positions.
✓ Copy preserves occurrence-specific data such as serving counts and confirms before replacing an occupied slot.
✓ Swap preserves both scheduled occurrences and does not change recipe usage counts.
✓ The roadmap was audited again; reusable meal-plan templates were removed by product decision and stale calendar notes were cleaned up.
💡

Ideas for Your Family

MealCrew now turns your own family data into explainable meal recommendations instead of generic suggestions.

✓ Added Family Favorites, Forgotten Favorites, Use What We Have, Use It Before It Goes Bad, Quick Tonight, Everyone Likes This, and Requested Lately.
✓ Every suggestion explains why it was recommended using ratings, favorites, last-made history, Pantry, perishability, completion time, and requests.
✓ Added All / Breakfast / Lunch / Dinner filters.
✓ Added Ideas to the sidebar, mobile menu, and Home quick actions.
✓ Everyone Likes This requires at least two family ratings and every recorded rating must be 4 stars or better.
✓ Recommendation cards link directly to the meal and can add it to Make Soon.
🍽️

Serving Sizes & Recipe Scaling

Recipes can now scale ingredient quantities to the number of people you are actually feeding.

✓ Full Recipes now store a normal serving count, with existing recipes defaulting to 4 until edited.
✓ Recipe pages can scale safely parseable ingredient quantities for a different serving count.
✓ Cooking Mode carries the chosen serving count and scaled ingredient list.
✓ Choosing a recipe for the calendar can store an occurrence-specific serving count.
✓ Generated plans support per-meal serving counts before they are scheduled.
✓ Shopping Cart calculations use scaled quantities from scheduled recipes when MealCrew can safely parse them.
✓ Ingredient lines MealCrew cannot safely scale are left unchanged instead of guessed.
📖

Recipe & Shopping Finalization

Recipes now show readiness problems at a glance, and Shopping Cart behaves more like one connected meal workflow.

✓ Added Recipe Readiness filters for missing core recipe details, completion time, photos, and fully complete recipes.
✓ Recipe cards now flag missing smart-data fields so incomplete recipes are easy to find and fix.
✓ Recipe editing explains which ingredient data powers What Can I Make?, Pantry, Shopping Cart, and food-waste planning.
✓ Manual Shopping Cart items now use normalized ingredient names to reduce duplicate grocery entries.
✓ Shopping Cart warns when a recognizable food item is already marked on hand.
✓ Checked purchased groceries now truly move into Pantry and leave the shopping list.
✓ Renamed planned-food refresh to Sync Planned Meals and clarified what the sync does.
🥫

Pantry & What Can I Make?

Pantry tracking and recipe matching are faster, clearer, and more honest about what you can actually make.

✓ What Can I Make? no longer shows misleading matches when the Pantry is empty.
✓ Recipes with missing or unusable ingredient data are separated instead of being presented as ready-to-make matches.
✓ Match cards now show ingredient coverage and clearer Ready to Make / Missing ingredient labels.
✓ Added a quick Mark On Hand action directly from What Can I Make? and a faster mobile-friendly Pantry entry flow.
✓ Shopping Cart refresh now skips ingredients already marked on hand and can move checked purchases into Pantry.
✓ Improved common ingredient-name normalization so simple singular/plural differences create fewer false mismatches.
📧

Email Notifications

MealCrew can now send useful transactional email without turning the app into another spam source.

✓ Added reusable Gmail SMTP delivery using the NAS .env configuration; mail credentials are never stored in app.py, the database, or release ZIPs.
✓ My Account now supports an optional email address and separate Meal Request and Family notification preferences.
✓ Added a Send Test Email button so each user can verify their own setup.
✓ Family Admins can receive new meal-request alerts; requesters can receive approved, moved, or declined updates.
✓ Family Admins can email a Family Invite link and code directly from the Family page.
✓ Welcome/family membership emails are supported, while passwords are deliberately never emailed.
✓ Weekly meal-plan summary email was intentionally not added.
🖱️

Interactive Meal Calendar

The Meal Calendar is now an active planning workspace instead of only a place to view scheduled meals.

✓ Drag scheduled meals to another date or meal slot on desktop.
✓ Dropping onto an occupied slot asks before replacing the existing meal.
✓ Click or tap a scheduled meal for View Recipe, Change Meal, or Remove from Calendar.
✓ Changes started from the Calendar return you to the Calendar after choosing a replacement.
✓ Empty Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner slots remain direct add/change targets for that exact date.
✓ Mobile keeps tap-based controls so calendar interactions do not fight normal page scrolling.
🧭

Navigation & Branding Polish

Late Day 4 cleanup made key destinations easier to find and MealCrew branding easier to read.

✓ Moved Today’s Meals into the permanent PLAN navigation and removed the redundant Home-page button.
✓ Enlarged desktop MealCrew branding and added the full wordmark/slogan to the mobile header.
✓ Added an obvious New Recipe button to the Recipe Library.
✓ Fixed remaining small desktop/mobile UI alignment issues found during testing.

August 12, 2026

🧭

New & Improved MealCrew UI

MealCrew received its biggest visual redesign yet, moving from a traditional website layout to a modern application workspace.

✓ Added a persistent desktop navigation sidebar with grouped Plan, Food, and Crew tools.
✓ Centered page workspaces in the usable area beside the sidebar instead of pinning content to one side.
✓ Kept mobile navigation purpose-built for smaller screens instead of simply shrinking the desktop layout.
🌿

MealCrew Brand & Visual Identity

Meal Planner became MealCrew — Plan it. Shop it. Make it. Together. — with a complete visual identity throughout the app.

✓ Added the MealCrew logo family and updated site branding.
✓ Reworked the background, secondary actions, and interface palette around MealCrew greens.
✓ Added family and profile imagery throughout account and sharing screens.
📸

Photos Throughout MealCrew

Meals and recipes are now much more visual, with photos appearing where families actually browse and plan food.

✓ Added photos to scheduled Yesterday / Today / Tomorrow meal cards.
✓ Added large hero images to Recipe and Quick Meal detail pages.
✓ Added compact thumbnails to the Recipe Library.
✓ Uploaded family photos and profile pictures continue to replace stock/default artwork automatically.
🥕

Ingredient Artwork & Photo Library

Ingredient Library entries can now have their own photos and receive smarter MealCrew stock artwork when no family image has been uploaded.

✓ Added ingredient photo uploads and compact ingredient thumbnails.
✓ Audited stock-image matching so obvious ingredients receive recognizable artwork.
✓ Unknown ingredients now use a dedicated generic ingredient image instead of unrelated meal photography.
🍳

Unified Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner Planning

The automatic planners now behave consistently across every meal period.

✓ Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner use the same Kids Only, Adults Only, and Full Family planning controls.
✓ Meal Planner tabs now switch directly between planning Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner without leaving the planner flow.
✓ Planner forms were centered and aligned with the redesigned application workspace.
📖

Recipe Detail Redesign

Recipe pages now put the actual food and cooking information first instead of burying it beneath actions.

✓ Ingredients and instructions now lead the page and use a two-column desktop layout when space allows.
✓ Ratings and family feedback follow the recipe content.
✓ Make Soon, Start Cooking, sharing, and management actions were moved lower on the page.
❓

Searchable Help Center

A dedicated Help Center now explains MealCrew features without requiring users to guess what controls do.

✓ Search Help by feature or keyword.
✓ Filter help topics by category.
✓ Open individual topics for more detailed explanations.
👨‍🍳

Cooking Mode

Full recipes now have a simple, distraction-free screen built for actually cooking from a phone or kitchen counter.

✓ Start Cooking opens directly from any full Recipe detail page.
✓ Ingredients are large and tappable so they can be checked off while cooking.
✓ Instructions are shown one step at a time with Previous and Next controls.
✓ Cooking progress is kept in the current browser tab without changing the recipe or database.

August 11, 2026

🥕

Ingredient Library Cleanup

Ingredient Library is now easier to trust, clean, and understand.

✓ Each ingredient now shows the recipes that currently use it, with clickable meal links.
✓ Added usage counts plus Unused and Used Once filters to surface likely junk or one-off ingredients.
✓ Ingredients can be removed from the library without deleting them from recipe text.
✓ Removed ingredients are suppressed from future recipe scans so unwanted carry-over items do not immediately come back.
✓ Added a Smart Audit action that applies better perishability, shelf-life, waste-priority, and shopping-category defaults to unreviewed ingredients while preserving manual edits.
✓ Ingredient cleanup remains per family/household.
🛒

Shopping Categories

The shopping list is now organized the way you actually walk through a store.

✓ Ingredient Library now stores one reusable shopping category per ingredient.
✓ Starter categories include Produce, Meat & Seafood, Dairy & Eggs, Frozen, Bakery, Pantry, Deli, Beverages, Household, and Other.
✓ Existing ingredients receive sensible starter categories automatically and can be corrected at any time.
✓ Shopping Cart automatically groups items by category instead of presenting one long alphabetical list.
✓ Category metadata lives in Ingredient Library rather than being duplicated separately in the shopping cart.
✓ Store-specific aisle numbers remain intentionally out of scope because layouts vary by store.
⏱️

Meal Completion Time & Make Soon

MealCrew can now answer both ‘how long will this take?’ and ‘what do we want to make sometime soon?’

✓ Recipes and Quick Meals can store an exact total completion time in minutes.
✓ Recipe Library adds ≤10, ≤20, ≤30, ≤45, ≤60 minute and Unknown Time filters.
✓ Quick Tonight opens a ≤30-minute picker and the automatic planner can optionally enforce any maximum completion time.
✓ Families now share a Make Soon queue without assigning meals to calendar dates.
✓ Make Soon meals are prioritized while picking and show family rating, last-made information, completion time, and pantry match where available.
✓ The whole Make Soon queue can contribute its recipe/shopping items to the shopping cart before dates are chosen.
⚡

Recipe Type Filtering

Large mixed meal libraries are easier to browse now that Quick Meals and full Recipes can be separated.

✓ Added a Recipe Library Type filter with All, Recipes, and Quick Meals.
✓ Type filtering combines with meal period, ratings, tags, last-made history, sorting, and search.
✓ The selected Type filter is preserved while switching between every other Recipe Library filter.
🛡️

Stability & Security Cleanup

A full source/database sanity audit caught several hidden issues before they surfaced in normal use.

✓ Fixed Website Recipe Import failing when HTML entity cleanup was needed because Python's html module was not imported.
✓ Recipe URL import now rejects localhost, private, loopback, link-local, and other non-public network targets and re-validates redirects.
✓ Corrected legacy dinner-history and saved-plan migration guards that were accidentally checking Breakfast records.
✓ Removed obsolete recipe templates that referenced routes no longer present in the current recipe workflow.
✓ Upgrade/source packages now exclude the live database, backup copies, Flask secret key, logs, and Python cache files.
🚀

Roadmap 2.0 Public Preview

The public roadmap now shows the ideas being considered after the original development roadmap.

✓ Coming Soon now previews Meal Completion Time, Make Soon, smart family suggestions, recipe scaling, Calendar 2.0, reusable templates, Cooking Mode, shopping categories, smarter recommendations, and calendar integration.
✓ Each idea gets a short description so testers can understand the concept and give useful feedback.
✓ Candidate features are clearly labeled as NEXT, IDEA, BIG IDEA, LATER, or DEFERRED — they are not promises until reviewed.
✓ Email & Request Notifications remains intentionally deferred at the bottom.
🧹

Landing & Session Polish

Fixed several issues discovered while testing the new public experience.

✓ Logout no longer fails with an expired CSRF token after the app has been left open for a long time.
✓ CSRF tokens now follow the app's long-lived session model instead of expiring after the framework's short default window.
✓ Other stale forms get a friendly retry message rather than a raw 400 Bad Request page.
✓ Logged-out visitors who open a bookmarked private URL such as /dinner are redirected to the public landing page.
✓ Fixed the desktop landing-page feature cards so paragraph text uses the full card width and wraps normally.
🌐

Public Landing Page & App Preview

Logged-out visitors now see what MealCrew can do instead of landing immediately on a sign-in form.

✓ Added a public product-style landing page with feature previews for planning, recipes, family collaboration, pantry/shopping, and food-waste tools.
✓ Moved Log In and Create Account actions into the logged-out top bar.
✓ Made What's New / Updates available without an account.
✓ Public pages expose feature descriptions and release information only — never household plans, recipes, users, requests, or other private family data.
✓ Already signed-in users continue directly into their planner.

August 10, 2026

🏷️

In-App Version & Changelog

MealCrew now identifies the exact app version currently running and surfaces a concise recent-change list.

✓ Current app version and release date are defined centrally in the application.
✓ Version is visible in the What's New page, mobile menu, and footer.
✓ What's New now includes a concise Recent Changes section for quick scanning.
✓ Future releases only need their version metadata updated in one place.
📱

Mobile Navigation Menu

The crowded mobile header has been replaced with a clean grouped menu.

✓ Mobile now shows the MealCrew brand and a single Menu button instead of squeezing every link into one row.
✓ Desktop navigation remains fully visible and unchanged in purpose.
🧭

Context-Aware Navigation & Roadmap Cleanup

Meal-period navigation now appears only where Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner switching actually makes sense.

✓ Meal-period navigation remains available on meal planning and meal-detail screens where it is useful.
✓ Fixed internal Roadmap section headings so Ideas and Reference notes no longer leak into the previous feature card.
✓ Email & Request Notifications was moved to the actual bottom of the To Do list.
🕒

Better Last-Made Information

MealCrew now shows what your family has eaten recently — and which meals have been forgotten.

✓ Recipe cards show the exact last-made date plus a friendly time-since label.
✓ Meals with no history are clearly marked Never Made.
✓ Added filters for Never Made, recent meals, and meals not made in 90+ days.
✓ Added sorting by Most Recently Made or Least Recently Made / Never First.
✓ Future scheduled meals do not incorrectly count as already made.
🍳

What Can I Make?

MealCrew can now match recipes against ingredients you already have at home.

✓ Added a Pantry / On Hand list for ingredients currently available.
✓ Recipes are ranked by how many meaningful ingredients are missing.
✓ Exact Match, Almost There, and Close Match make it easy to spot good options.
✓ Use Perishables First can prioritize recipes that help consume fragile ingredients.
✓ Missing ingredients can be added directly to the shopping cart.
🏷️

Recipe Organization & Tags

Growing meal libraries can now be organized with custom tags, filters, and sorting.

✓ Meals can have multiple custom tags such as Italian, Grill, Crockpot, Kid Favorite, or anything your family creates.
✓ Recipe Library can filter by tags alongside meal period, ratings, and search.
✓ Added sorting by name, family rating, usage, or newest added.
✓ Tags travel with shared/copyable meals between connected families.
✓ Shopping / Pack Items entered on separate lines now stay as separate items.
🤝

Cross-Family Recipe Sharing Improvements

Shared recipes are now easier to discover and manage between connected families.

✓ Shared recipes created by any member of a connected household are now discoverable.
✓ Existing recipe pages have a direct auto-saving Shared/Private checkbox.
✓ Private recipes remain hidden from connected families.
✓ Import from URL is now available directly from the Add Meal recipe-import panel.
🌐

Website Recipe Import

Recipes can now be pulled into MealCrew by pasting a recipe webpage URL.

✓ MealCrew attempts to import recipe name, ingredients, instructions, servings, and image.
✓ Import uses standard recipe data published by many recipe websites.
✓ Every import opens on a review screen so mistakes can be corrected before saving.
✓ Imported recipes can be assigned to Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, or multiple meal categories.
✓ No paid recipe-import service is required.
📦

Smarter Shopping & Package Utilization

The shopping list can now compare what your recipes need with what you actually bought.

✓ Planned ingredients combine across upcoming Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner meals.
✓ Shopping items show how much is needed and which recipes use each ingredient.
✓ You can record the exact quantity and unit you actually purchased.
✓ MealCrew estimates leftovers, package utilization, or whether you may be short.
✓ Typical package sizes from the Ingredient Library can be used as a one-click purchased amount.
🥬

Ingredient Intelligence & Food-Waste Planning

MealCrew can now understand which ingredients are worth reusing before they spoil.

✓ Added an Ingredient Library with perishable, fresh-life, pantry-staple, waste-priority, and package-size settings.
✓ Added Balanced and Aggressive Food-Waste Optimization modes to the meal planner.
✓ Planner can favor useful overlap such as sour cream, herbs, produce, tortillas, cream, and buns while ignoring pantry staples like salt and spices.
✓ Generated plans can explain useful reuse with notes such as “Reuses Sour Cream, Cilantro.”
👥

Cross-Family Dinner & Recipe Sharing

Families can safely connect with approved friends or relatives while keeping their accounts separate.

✓ Added opt-in family-to-family connections using a separate Family Sharing Code.
✓ Connected families can view each other's full monthly dinner plans with previous/next month navigation.
✓ Shared recipes are enabled by default, with a private “do not share” option for secret recipes.
✓ Connected families can copy a shared recipe into their own independent family recipe library.
✓ Cross-family sharing never exposes usernames, passwords, roles, or other private account information.
🗳️

Meal Requests 2.0 & Family Voting

Meal requests became a full family workflow instead of a one-time message.

✓ Family members can request a meal for a specific date and meal period.
✓ Everyone in the family can vote thumbs-up or thumbs-down on pending requests.
✓ Meal requests can be approved, declined, or moved to another date.
✓ Approved requests are placed directly onto the family calendar with conflict protection.
✓ Added request history, status tracking, notes, and a Popular Requests view.
⭐

Ratings, Favorites & Rating-Aware Planning

Every family member can have their own opinion about a meal, and the planner can use those opinions.

✓ Added personal 1–5 star ratings and favorites.
✓ Family members can see one another's ratings and family-average scores.
✓ Added rating filters to the recipe library.
✓ Planner can prefer highly rated meals or restrict plans to 3★+, 4★+, or family favorites.
✓ Unrated meals remain eligible by default unless specifically excluded.
✓ Ratings and favorites save automatically.
📖

Recipe Library & Multi-Category Meals

Recipes and quick meals are easier to browse, reuse, and organize.

✓ Added an always-available Recipes page with Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, rating, and text filters.
✓ A single recipe can belong to Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, or any combination of the three.
✓ Added Pick a Meal vs Surprise Me when changing a scheduled meal.
✓ Planner remembers each user's most recently used rating settings.
📅

Generated Plans Now Schedule Correctly

Generated plans now truly become dated family meal plans instead of only being saved drafts.

✓ Fixed generated plans so they write into the calendar and meal history.
✓ Added conflict handling when a generated plan hits an occupied date.
✓ Users can replace an existing meal, keep it and shift the generated plan forward, or cancel.
✓ Split Kids Only / Adults Only dinner plans are preserved correctly.
🛒

Smarter Shopping Cart Controls

Upcoming meal ingredients can be added without destroying the shopping list you already built.

✓ Added all current planned food to the shopping cart for today and future dates only.
✓ Planned-food import is additive and preserves existing manual items.
✓ Added Check All, Clear Checked, and Remove All controls.
✓ Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner shopping views are supported.

August 9, 2026

🏠

Family Accounts & Permissions

MealCrew became a true multi-user family app.

✓ Added separate family households with individual user accounts.
✓ Added family management, member, and Read Only permission levels.
✓ Family members can edit their own display names.
✓ Read Only accounts can safely interact without changing the shared family plan.
🌎

Family Time Zones

Each household now controls what MealCrew considers today.

✓ Added family-level time zone settings.
✓ Fixed date rollover so Pacific families no longer see tomorrow while it is still evening.
🍳

Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner

MealCrew expanded from Dinner/Lunch into a complete three-meal planner.

✓ Added Breakfast as a full meal period.
✓ Standardized navigation and display order to Breakfast → Lunch → Dinner.
✓ Breakfast participates in planning, calendar, shopping, requests, history, and family sharing.
📸

Recipe Photo Import

Recipes can be entered from a phone photo instead of typing everything manually.

✓ Added recipe photo capture/upload workflow.
✓ Phone users can choose an existing photo or take a new one.
✓ Imported recipe text stays editable so scanning mistakes can be corrected.
🗓️

Family Meal Calendar

Scheduled meals can be viewed together instead of only from individual meal screens.

✓ Added weekly and monthly meal calendar views.
✓ Added printable meal-plan views.
✓ Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner appear together in calendar order.
🎲

Automatic Meal Planning

The app can generate a family meal plan instead of making you decide every meal manually.

✓ Added automatic meal-plan generation.
✓ Added Full Family, Kids Only, and Adults Only dinner planning.
✓ Added rotation/usage tracking.
✓ Added duplicate prevention so the same meal is not generated twice within one plan.
🧒

Kid-Friendly Meal Requests

Read Only accounts gained a safe way to participate in family meal planning.

✓ Kids and other Read Only users can request meals without editing the calendar.
✓ Requests are visible to authorized family members for review.
🔐

Self-Service Signup & Family Invites

New families can create their own space without requiring manual account setup.

✓ Added self-service account creation.
✓ Users can create a new family or join an existing family with an invite code.
✓ Family invite codes can be regenerated when needed.

Coming Soon

These are ideas we're considering, not promises. If one sounds useful, tell us — feedback can change what gets built next.

🔔 CURRENT

Mobile Push Notifications

Finish notification delivery end-to-end on Android and iOS with Firebase/APNs credentials, device-token registration, and real-device verification.

🏠 NEXT

Home Today Timeline

See today's family events and meals together in one chronological view so you can understand the household's day at a glance.

🍽️ PLANNED

Busy-Night Dinner Intelligence

Use family schedules, event overlap, who's home for dinner, cook availability, and quick-meal awareness to make better dinner decisions on busy days.

📱 PLANNED

MealCrew Mobile Apps

MealCrew is moving into dedicated Android and iPhone/iPad testing so families can use the same MealCrew experience as an installed mobile app.

📸 PLANNED

Add Schedule From Photo

Take or upload a schedule, review the events MealCrew finds, assign family members, and add the whole schedule to the family calendar together.

📆 PLANNED

External Calendar Support

Subscribe to your private MealCrew family schedule from Apple Calendar, Google Calendar, or Outlook.

Have a Better Idea?

This roadmap is intentionally flexible. The best features often come from families actually using MealCrew and noticing something that would make everyday planning easier.