WFD vs Plate Up: reliability is the whole product

Disclosure first: we make What's For Dinner?! (WFD). Plate Up is a UK app with a genuinely appealing pitch: browse recipes from well known chefs, plan your week, and push every ingredient into a Tesco or Sainsbury's basket in a few taps. Free, no subscription. On paper it automates more of the dinner admin than almost anything else on the UK market.

The whole promise rests on one thing, though. The numbers have to be right. Every quantity, every ingredient, every item that lands in the basket. And that is exactly where its own reviewers say it lets them down. Everything quoted below is from a public, dated App Store review; the conclusions we draw from them are our opinion.

What the reviews actually say

These are all public App Store reviews of Plate Up, dated, and easy to find.

A two star review from March 2024 says a number of the recipes "haven't been proof read", and gives examples: a quick chicken, leek and chorizo pie whose directions add raw chicken breast at a stage where it "would never cook", and a halloumi wrap recipe whose step 3 tells you to cook sweetcorn that appears nowhere on the ingredients list. The reviewer adds there are "lots of other examples."

A three star review from May 2021 describes setting the app to cook for one and being told to use "0.17 of a lime". The reviewer's diagnosis: the recipes were designed for four and mechanically subdivided.

A one star review from September 2022 describes a salmon and roast vegetable recipe, set for one person, that ordered two tins of salmon flakes among other things and produced a basket of over £18 for a single dinner. Another, from May 2022, found recipes in the app that were "just placeholders with the words 'label' repeated over and over."

Then there is the handover to the supermarket, which is the moment the whole product exists for. The same March 2024 reviewer describes multiple logins, repeated transfer attempts, and then "loads of missing items" once it finally works, each one needing manual reconciling in the supermarket's own app. Another review the same month says the app freezes and simply doesn't add the ingredients to the cart.

Here is the thing that stands out reading all of these: almost every critical reviewer loves the idea. "The concept is brilliant" appears in the middle of a two star review. People wanted it to work.

Why this keeps happening

Plate Up carries a big celebrity chef catalogue and live product mappings into two supermarkets. That is an enormous surface area for a small team, and every recipe times every serving size times every supermarket product is a place where a number can go quietly wrong. Our reading, and it is only that: when you chase breadth, checking everything by hand stops being possible, and the errors those reviewers describe are what the trade looks like from the customer's side.

And with groceries the cost of a single error is brutal. One shop that arrives wrong, one pie recipe that would have served undercooked chicken, and the trust is gone. From then on you check every item yourself, at which point the app is saving you nothing.

What WFD does instead

WFD starts from the opposite priority. A person checks every meal before it ships: every quantity, every step and every line it adds to the shopping list. Reliability comes first, because a meal planner you have to double-check is just a longer way of doing it yourself.

The flow is different too. WFD is built for households rather than a lone cook: everyone swipes on meals on their own phone, a mutual match decides dinner, matches build the weekly plan, and the plan builds one shared shopping list that updates itself when the week changes. Free to download and free to use for swiping, matching and the weekly plan, with no time limit; Full Access, one subscription for the whole household with a 3-day free trial, adds the list and the editing. Built in the UK, by a couple, for couples and families.

One more thing, since it is the obvious question. Taking the list all the way to a delivered shop is on WFD's roadmap. We are shipping it the way we ship everything else: when it is boringly dependable, because a basket that is 90 percent right is worse than a list that is 100 percent right. If you want to see the part that already works, here is how the matching builds your week. And if anything above has gone out of date, tell us and we will correct it.