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Recipes: built in, Mealie optional

Pantry Raider always uses Grocy for inventory. Recipes, the meal plan, and the shopping list are built into Pantry Raider itself, so a standard install (Pantry Raider plus Grocy) gives you the whole app: nothing else to run, no extra container, and everything fits comfortably on a 2 GB board.

Short answer: you do not need Mealie. Every recipe feature works out of the box. Mealie support remains for people who already use it: connect yours and it keeps working exactly as before, or copy your library into Pantry Raider with one click and stop running the extra service.

What the standard install includes

  • Recipes. Your own library, stored in Pantry Raider. Import from a web address, a photo, a PDF, a file, the external catalogs, or the Forager community, generate a recipe with AI, or write one by hand. A recipe in your library can be opened and edited later too: change the name, description, servings, prep, cook, and total time, ingredients, steps, and the photo. Pictures ride along and everything is covered by the normal app backup. (A recipe kept in Mealie is still edited there.) A recipe written in parts (for the pasta, for the sauce, for the topping) keeps its ingredient sections everywhere: through a photo or file import, in the editor where you can rename or merge them, through the Optimize button, on the printout, and on the On the Line page, where each heading sits above its ingredients the way the recipe was written.
  • Cook ("What can I cook?"). Ranks your recipes by how much of each one is already in your Grocy stock and floats items expiring soon to the top, turning "this is about to go off" into "here is what to make with it".
  • Meal plan. A week view you fill from your library or with free-text lines like "Leftovers".
  • Shopping list. Kept in Grocy, right next to your inventory, so "things you buy" live with "things you stock". One click adds a recipe's missing ingredients; check items off as you shop, from the page, a barcode scanner in shopping mode, or the Stream Deck. When the groceries come home, the Shopping page's Add receipt button (shown when an AI provider is set up) reads the prices you actually paid off a photo of the receipt and records each one on the matching product's newest stock entry, so Grocy's price history and inventory value reflect real prices. You review the pairings first and untick anything that looks wrong; a line the receipt cannot answer for is skipped, never guessed. Reading the photo takes a minute or two and runs in the background, so you are free to leave the page: when it finishes, the pairings are waiting on the Shopping page, with a note in your Review inbox that links straight to them.
  • On the Line, timers, printing, Home Assistant sensors. All of it works against the built-in library and list.

The stock matching is by ingredient name: "unsalted butter" in a recipe and "butter" in your stock match on shared words, with your staples list filling the gaps. That is the same matching the app has always used, and it works for imported and AI recipes that will never be linked to a product record. When a recipe names an amount and the product has unit conversions defined in Grocy, the match checks the amount too: a bottle known to hold 500 g honestly covers, or fails to cover, a recipe's 200 g, instead of the name alone deciding. Products without a stored conversion behave exactly as before.

If you already use Mealie

Connecting a Mealie you already run is fully supported:

  • Add its address and API token in Settings under Recipes. Your Mealie library, meal plan, and shopping list keep working through Pantry Raider exactly as before. Nothing about your Mealie is changed.
  • Whenever you are ready, use Copy recipes into Pantry Raider (Settings, Recipes pane, or the button on the Recipes page). It copies every recipe, pictures included, switches the library to Pantry Raider, and moves the shopping list to Grocy. It is safe to run more than once (recipes you already have are skipped), and your Mealie is left untouched, so you can keep it around or retire the container on your own schedule.
  • Mealie export files import directly on the Recipes page too, so even a Mealie that Pantry Raider never connected to can hand over its library.

Running Mealie alongside (optional)

New installs do not set up Mealie. If you want it anyway, it ships as an opt-in Docker Compose profile:

docker compose --profile with-grocy --profile with-mealie up -d

On a Raspberry Pi appliance, set ENABLE_MEALIE=true before installing, or add it later on a running device:

cd /opt/foodassistant
docker compose --profile with-mealie up -d

Mealie comes up on port 9285 and needs about 4 GB of total RAM to run comfortably alongside the rest of the stack. Connect it in Settings under Recipes.

See Platforms for the full profile and port reference, and the README install section for the one-line installers.

A note on Grocy's own recipe feature

Grocy ships its own recipe module with product-linked, exact fulfillment. Pantry Raider does not use it: Grocy requires every ingredient to be a real product in its catalog, which would fill your inventory (the heart of the app) with one-off phantom products every time you import a web recipe. The built-in library keeps recipes in their own store and leaves your Grocy product list clean; only the shopping list lives in Grocy, where free-text lines are first-class.