The Yummly Shutdown: What Happened and What's Next for Recipe Planning

In December 2024, Yummly went dark . No warning email, no gradual wind-down—one of the most popular recipe platforms just... stopped. If you were one of the millions of people who opened Yummly every Sunday to plan your week, you probably noticed.

What Happened to Yummly?

Yummly started in 2008 as a recipe search engine and took off fast, hitting 15 million active users by 2014. What made it sticky was the personalisation—it learnt what you liked, remembered your dietary restrictions, and got better at suggesting recipes the more you used it.

In 2017, Whirlpool bought Yummly for a reported $100 million. The idea was to tie it into their smart kitchen appliances: imagine your oven knowing what you're cooking and adjusting the temperature automatically. After the acquisition, they added features like food image recognition and launched a connected smart thermometer.

But in April 2024, Whirlpool laid off the entire Yummly team. The app stayed online for a few more months, running on autopilot, before going offline in December. If you visit yummly.com today, you'll land on KitchenAid's recipe page instead.

According to TheSpoon's reporting , it's part of a bigger trend: appliance companies are moving away from building their own recipe apps and betting on generative AI to handle cooking guidance instead. Whether that bet pays off remains to be seen.

Why This Matters

Yummly wasn't just another recipe website—it was the app that answered "what's for dinner?" for a lot of people, every single day. You'd tell it you were gluten-free, that you couldn't stand coriander, that you had 30 minutes on a Tuesday evening, and it would figure something out. That kind of personalisation took months to build up.

When the app disappeared, all of that went with it. Your saved favourites, your taste profile, your go-to weeknight meals—gone. And now you're starting from zero somewhere else, teaching a new app that yes, you really do eat that much chicken.

That's the part that stings. It's not just losing recipes (those are everywhere). It's losing the tool that already knew you.

Finding an Alternative

So where do you go from here? That depends on what you actually used Yummly for.

If you mostly browsed for recipe ideas, AllRecipes and Food Network have massive libraries with user reviews. You'll find plenty of inspiration, though neither one learns your preferences the way Yummly did.

If the meal planning was the real draw, you'll want a dedicated planning app rather than just another recipe search engine. The difference matters: recipe sites help you find a meal. Planning apps help you figure out the whole week—what to cook, when, and what to buy.

That's what we built MenuMagic to do. You tell it your preferences—dietary needs, how many people you're feeding, how much time you have—and it generates a full weekly plan with a shopping list. No scrolling through hundreds of recipes trying to Tetris them into a week. Just a plan, ready to go.

It's a different philosophy than Yummly's "browse and save" approach, but for anyone who used Yummly primarily as a planning tool, it solves the same core problem. Try it yourself .

What Comes Next

Here's the uncomfortable truth about Yummly's shutdown: it can happen to any app you rely on. When a company's priorities change, your favourite feature becomes someone else's line item to cut. We've seen it happen with Google Reader, Sunrise Calendar, and dozens of other tools people loved.

That doesn't mean you shouldn't use apps—just be thoughtful about it. Ask yourself what you actually need. Recipe inspiration? Structured weekly planning? A shopping list that writes itself? You might not find one app that does everything Yummly did, but you can probably find something that does the part you cared about most even better.

The meal planning space is genuinely getting better. New tools (ours included) are using AI in ways that go beyond what Yummly offered. The daily "what's for dinner?" problem isn't going away, and neither are the people building solutions for it.

Moving Forward

If you're one of the people still feeling the Yummly-shaped hole in your routine, here's my advice: don't just grab the first alternative you find. Take a week to notice what you actually miss. Is it the recipes? The planning structure? The shopping lists? Once you know that, you can pick a tool that fits—instead of trying to recreate Yummly exactly.

Cooking should be the fun part. The planning? That should take five minutes, not your entire Sunday afternoon.

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Want to skip the recipe scrolling and get straight to a weekly plan? MenuMagic builds your meal plan and shopping list based on what you like to eat. Give it a try .