You tell Mirabelly who's at your table; it hands back one weekly grocery list. Here's what happens in between — including the parts we'd rather you knew up front.
Mirabelly starts with people, not recipes. Every person in your household gets their own daily targets — calories, protein, fiber, and the micronutrients that usually go missing, like iron, folate, calcium, and iodine — from USDA dietary reference intakes for their age and sex. Pregnancy and nursing are handled as their own stages, because those needs genuinely differ. Across the household it tracks 24 nutrients. Nobody gets averaged into one household number.
The week is built from a curated catalog of 623 foods — whole ingredients and pantry staples, each one grounded in USDA FoodData Central data. It's deliberately far smaller than a supermarket. Every food in it has nutrition we can stand behind, an aisle it belongs in, and a botanical or animal family we can count, and that last part is what makes the variety further down this page checkable rather than decorative. The catalog grows; when it does, this number changes with it.
Then it solves — once, for the whole household, not once per person. The solver picks grams of each food so everyone's targets are met at the same time and it all lands in one shared list, grouped the way the store is. A full solve takes ~30 seconds, give or take: a couple is quicker, a big household with young kids is slower. It aims for about 90% of your household's calories, leaving you room to make your own choices, because a real week has birthday cake and Friday takeout in it. That share moves week to week, and the list tells you the number it actually planned. Working this way — balancing the basket instead of writing you a menu — is the whole idea, and it's where Mirabelly parts ways with meal-planning apps.
Every list comes back with a coverage scorecard: each person, each target, three states — met, marginal, low. Marginal and low are shown exactly as plainly as met is. When a week comes up short, it says so, and it names which person and which nutrient, so you can deny an item and re-balance without it, shuffle for a different basket, or simply walk into the week with your eyes open. Rounding a short week up to a comfortable green would make a nicer screenshot and a worse grocery list.
Variety here means something you can count. Mirabelly tracks 26 plant families — brassicas, alliums, legumes, berries, stone fruit and the rest — and the solve is rewarded for reaching across them instead of stacking ten things from one shelf. Rotation looks at what your recent lists already held, so this week moves rather than repeating. Seasonality leans the produce toward what the month is actually good for. It's a narrower claim than "eat the rainbow", and a far more checkable one.
Set a weekly budget and the list aims near your number. When a week runs over, you get a plain banner saying so and by how much — no quiet creep, no rounding in our favor. For context, we show how your week compares with the USDA food-plan benchmark for a household like yours. What we won't tell you is that Mirabelly makes your groceries cheaper. Nutrition comes first in the solve, and price is shown for context — that's not something the solver is pushing down.
Targets come from USDA dietary reference intakes; per-food amounts come from USDA FoodData Central. Solve time and the planned-calorie share are typical figures, not promises — both move with your household. Mirabelly is in invite-only beta.
Mirabelly is in invite-only beta. Request an invite and we'll email you when a spot opens.
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