Fridge photos to dinner: 3 high-protein recipes in 3 minutes
How the AI meal planner works, why we built it for people on tight budgets, and what actually comes out of a real fridge on a Tuesday night.
The most common message I get from patients in the first three months of sobriety is a version of this:
"I've got £30 for the week, chicken and some veg in the fridge, no idea what to cook, and I'm exhausted. So I'm going to have toast for dinner again."
Toast is not dinner. But when your executive function is at 40% and your budget is tight, toast is what happens.
Anchor's AI meal planner exists because of exactly this. Two ways to use it:
Option 1 — type what you have
Open Anchor → Meals & Recipes → "What's in the fridge?" → type the ingredients you can see, one per line, and hit Get recipes. Three high-protein, low-salt, alcohol-free recipes appear in about 12 seconds, each with:
- Estimated protein, salt, carbs, calories
- Prep time
- Rough cost per serving
- Full ingredient list + numbered steps
Option 2 — photograph the fridge
Open the fridge door, take one photo of the inside, upload it. The vision model identifies up to 12 edible ingredients on its own, drops them into the textarea, then generates the same three recipes.
For anyone with ADHD, low mood, or executive fatigue — which is a lot of people in early sobriety — Option 2 is transformative. You skip the decision-making entirely.
A real Tuesday-night fridge
Here's what came out of a real user's fridge last week (chicken thigh, half a lemon, a red pepper, some old spinach, half a bag of rice, an onion, an egg, a wedge of parmesan, milk):
Recipe 1 — Lemon pepper chicken & rice bowl (18 min, ~£1.40/serve, 42 g protein, 0.9 g salt)
Recipe 2 — Egg & spinach fried rice (12 min, ~£0.90/serve, 22 g protein, 0.7 g salt)
Recipe 3 — Chicken, pepper and onion tray-bake with parmesan crumb (30 min, ~£1.60/serve, 45 g protein, 1.1 g salt)
Every one hits the protein-first, salt-last brief. Every one uses only what was already in the fridge.
Why we made it free-to-try but subscription-gated
The AI calls cost money. Two or three scans a day per user × thousands of users adds up fast. The Companion subscription (£4.99/month) covers those AI costs and keeps the rest of the app — the diet tracker, medication tracker, glossary, sobriety counter, PDFs to your doctor — free forever for everyone.
If you're on a tight budget and want unlimited AI scans, start the 7-day free trial. If you never want to pay, the manual food-log and label scanner are yours forever.
What we're building next
- Weekly menu planner — one photo of your fridge on Sunday → the AI writes the whole week
- Shopping list generator — pick a recipe, the ingredients auto-add to a checklist
- "Cook this now" mode — one recipe, step-by-step, with a timer for each step
Because dinner shouldn't be another decision at the end of a hard day.