Recipe Backends

Recipes: do you need Mealie?

Pantry Raider always uses Grocy for inventory. Recipes, meal planning, and shopping lists are a separate, optional layer that runs on Mealie. This page explains what you get when you add Mealie, what works without it, and how to decide whether it is worth the extra container for your setup.

Short answer: if you want the recipe library, "what can I cook from what I have" suggestions, the week meal plan, or the shopping list, run Mealie. If you only care about tracking what's in your fridge and when it expires, you can skip it. Mealie is one more Docker container and a little more RAM, nothing more.

What you get with each setup

Grocy only (no Mealie)

This is the lean setup: Pantry Raider plus Grocy, no second recipe service.

You get everything inventory-related: the storage panels, drag-and-drop moves, expiry tracking and badges, barcode scanning, photo/receipt import, the expiry defaults table, and the Home Assistant sensors. The whole "reduce waste" side of the app works fully.

What you do not get: the Recipes, Cook ("what can I cook?"), Meal plan, and Shopping list pages. Those tabs depend on Mealie and stay dark until it is configured. The Current Recipe tab and timers still work for an imported or AI-generated recipe, but there is no recipe library to browse.

Pick this if you want the smallest footprint, you already plan meals elsewhere, or you are running on a tight board (a Pi 4 with 2 GB is comfortable for Grocy-only).

Grocy plus Mealie

Add Mealie and the recipe layer lights up:

• Recipes. A real recipe manager with a good editor, a URL importer, photo and file import, cookbooks, tags, and nutrition. This is where your recipe library lives.
• Cook ("What Can I Cook?"). Ranks your Mealie recipes by how much of each one is already in your Grocy stock, and floats items expiring soon to the top. This is the headline feature for a spoilage tracker: it turns "this is about to go off" into "here is what to make with it".
• Meal plan. A week view you can fill from your recipe library.
• Shopping list. Including a one-click "add the ingredients I am missing" from a recipe, with check-off as you shop.

How the inventory awareness works is worth knowing, because it shapes the tradeoffs below. Mealie itself has no idea what's in your fridge; by design it does not track pantry inventory. Pantry Raider bridges that gap itself: it reads your Grocy stock, matches it against Mealie's recipe ingredients by name, and does the "ready / needs staples / needs shopping" tiering and the "consume stock when you cook" step in its own Python code (see service/app/services/mealie.py). So the matching is by ingredient name, which is good but approximate: "unsalted butter" in a recipe and "butter" in your stock are matched on shared words, not on a shared product record.

Pick this (the recommended setup for most people) if you want the cooking and planning features, which are a big part of why the app exists. Plan for 4 GB of RAM once Mealie is in the mix.

How to choose

If you want...	Run
Just inventory and expiry tracking	Grocy only
Recipe library and a good recipe editor	Add Mealie
"What can I cook from what's expiring?"	Add Mealie
Meal planning and shopping lists	Add Mealie
The smallest possible footprint / a 2 GB board	Grocy only
The full app as advertised	Add Mealie

You are not locked in. Start Grocy-only and add Mealie later whenever you want the recipe features; the recipe tabs light up as soon as Mealie is configured in the setup wizard, and your inventory data is untouched.

Adding Mealie

Mealie ships as an opt-in Docker Compose profile, so you only run it if you ask for it.

On a server or Docker host, add the profile to your up command:

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

On a Raspberry Pi appliance, Mealie is installed by default for the Pi Hosted mode. To add it later to a running device:

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

Mealie comes up on port 9285. Create an API token inside Mealie, then paste the Mealie URL and token into the Pantry Raider setup wizard at /setup and test the connection. The Recipes, Cook, Meal plan, and Shopping tabs become available once the connection succeeds.

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 and meal-plan module, with native stock-fulfillment checking and a one-click "add missing ingredients to the shopping list". Because the ingredients are linked to real Grocy products, Grocy's fulfillment is exact rather than name-matched. That is genuinely appealing for a single-box appliance: recipes, stock, meal plan, and shopping list would all live in one service with one backup and one product catalog, and no second container.

Pantry Raider does not use Grocy's recipe module today. The entire recipe, cook, meal-plan, and shopping experience in the app is built on Mealie's API, and service/app/services/grocy.py implements no recipe support. Running the recipe features therefore means running Mealie. Using Grocy as the recipe backend instead would be a real feature to build, not a setting to flip; it is tracked as possible future work, not something you can turn on now. If a Grocy-native recipe mode would make your setup simpler, that is useful feedback to raise on the issue tracker.