Meal Planner and Shopping list Access DB

I am trying to build a meal planner and shopping list. At its heart, it is a tool to tell us how much of something to buy based on data we provide about what we will use.

The final product tells us how much of every consumable is needed for a certain period of time, either one or two weeks, based on our input. We collect this info by filling out a daily meal plan. That meal plan is made up of items, for example, mashed potatoes. Each item has a recipe that is made up of the info on the build list.

For example, mashed potatoes uses 4 lbs of potatoes, 2 cups milk, 4 tbsp butter. If we have mashed potatoes 4 times in the two week period, the shopping list will indicate we need 16 lbs of potatoes, 8 C Milk, 16 T butter.

We will fill in all the data, we just need to have the relationships established. I will enter mashed potatoes in the meal list. That will pull data from mashed potatoes in the item list, and the recipe for mashed potatoes in the recipes list (which I will create in the template you provide). The resulting data will go into the shopping

A daily meal plan might look like this:

Breakfast

Oatmeal

Hard Boiled Eggs

Grapefruit

Orange Juice

Ham and cheese sandwich

Broccoli

Milk

Baked Chicken Thighs

Mashed Potatoes

Green Salad

The recipes would be like this

Oatmeal : 1.5 C oatmeal, 1 C milk

Hard Boiled eggs: 6 eggs

Grapefruit: 3 Grapefruit

Ham and cheese sandwich: 12 slices bread, 4 ounces ham, 6 slices cheese, 1 tomato, 1/4 head lettuce

Broccoli: 1.5 heads broccoli

Milk: 4 C Milk

Baked Chicken Thighs: 6 chicken thighs, 2 eggs, 2 C breadcrumbs

Mashed Potatoes: 4 lbs potatoes, 2 C milk, 4 T butter

Green Salad: 1 head lettuce, 1 green pepper, 1 red onion, 1 tomato

Based on this we would need the following:

1.5 cups of oatmeal

8 eggs

5 cups of OJ

3 Grapefruit

12 pieces of bread

4 ounces of ham

6 Slices Cheese

6 chicken thighs

2 cups bread crumbs

4lbs of potatoes

8 cups milk, (5 for lunch, 2 with mashed potatoes, 1 for oatmeal)

4 T butter

1.25 Head Lettuce

1.5 Heads Broccoli

2 tomato (1 for ham and cheese, 1 for Salad)

1 red onion

1 Green Pepper

All of this would prefill in the shopping list because we would have entered all the recipes. It would be cumulative for all the days. So if we have 7 days of plans, the spreadsheet would add up all the ingredients from each day and give me a [url removed, login to view] resulting report would tell us, based on the meal plan, what we need to buy for the next week.

This would of course be integrated with some kind of weekly calendar, so we can fill in breakfast, lunch and dinner for each day, as well as giving us the ability to print the daily meal list, ingredients list for each item, and shopping list.

I think this would be best in Access DB because of the reports we could print, and the recipe integration, but I am open to other ideas. What do you think?

Microsoft Access

Project ID: #16706412

About the project