I’ve been in private practice for over five years now and the one thing that I’ve learned to value above all else is the extent to which palatable recipes enable my clients to best follow my nutrition guidance.

There is simply no other way to put it.

I know that the vast majority of my colleagues will know exactly what I mean when I say this.

I also know that, like me, you’ve spent a great deal of time sourcing the right set of recipes for your clients because we all know how unique individual tastes and preferences are.

So where am I going with this?

Well, I’ve recently been introduced to the meal planning platform Meal Garden which has MASSIVE potential to save you time and energy locating and organizing meal ideas for your clients.

In today’s blog post I really just want to give you an honest run through of the platform including examining how it works, what it costs and why I believe it can really make any dietitian’s life easier.

Let’s get right to it!

An intro To Meal Garden

As you’re about to find out, the basic premise of Meal Garden is empowering healthcare practitioners to help their clients more in less time and to make them look better while doing it.

Once we go through these next few sections, you will understand exactly how it achieves this.

Step 1 – Using The Search Feature

Finding the right recipe for your unique client’s needs is the most time consuming part of the procurement process – am I right?

Meal Garden has a very impressive search feature that allows you to use filters relevant to your clients needs to help quickly narrow down which recipes are the right fit.

For example, I can find recipes for all of my kale loving clients:

You can also directly input requests into the search bar such as “ Vegan meals that are high in protein” – which anyone who works with vegan/vegetarian clients will know is a super relevant consideration!

Among all of these super useful filters the one that I probably like the most is the ability to sort your findings by the time required to prep.

As you guys can appreciate, different clients have different upper limits when it comes to the amount of time they are willing to spend on food prep and while a 45 minute recipe may be perfect for the ultimate foodie, it isn’t necessarily the right choice for everyone.

From this perspective, Meal Garden pretty much blows the standard Google search for recipes right out of the water – oh and did I mention there are >2,500 options in the database?

Step 2 – Drag and Drop Meal Planning ( and more!)

So the old you might be throwing a few recipe hyperlinks from Google over to your client.

But the new you, using Meal Garden, can now arrange the customized recipe collection you’ve found for your client into a vibrant and organized plan that is easily arranged using a drag and drop feature with the icing on the cake being the one feature that pretty much all clients after – SHOPPING LISTS!

To curate a portion accurate shopping list is almost impossible to do manually but the Meal Garden meal planning interface makes it incredibly easy.

The amount of time this has saved both myself and my clients is quite frankly astonishing – in a good way.

But that’s not even my personal favourite part.

Take a look at the screenshot below  where you can see the beginning stages of my customized kale-centered meal plan.

This is only the tip of the ice berg though, as Meal Garden also offers full nutrient breakdowns of their recipes which will quench the curiosity of those clients who are really into the data-driven side of things.

So if I’ve got an athlete who needs to hit a certain protein goal per meal, they can feel confident they are doing that with the recipes I’ve provided.

Step 3 – Delivering The Content To Clients

So I’ve now got a custom curated collection of recipes that perfectly fit my client’s kale loving needs.

What do I do next?

Well, the Meal Garden app ( either through web or smart phone) connects me directly with any clients who want to take advantage of the service.

The communication platform is secure and encrypted and allows for the secure sharing of information.

Costs & Getting Started

I’m pretty confident that if you’ve read through this whole post, that you see the same incredible time saving value of Meal Garden.

It allows me personally to help my clients more and to do so in a far more efficient and professional way, especially in terms of the actual delivery of the plans.

The only question left to address is – what will this set you back?

Well, you can have ALL the clients you want on the platform for $30 USD a month ( around ~40 Canadian).

Given that this application is going to literally save you hours of toiling AND make you look like a far better professional – the value proposition really isn’t debatable.

If you agree, head over to the sign up page to get started!

Andy De Santis RD MPH