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Why: Help your members stay on track with their nutrition goals by enabling calorie budget tracking. This feature allows them to set daily calorie targets and see how many calories they have left for the week, enhancing their meal planning experience.
Navigate: App Station > Settings > Access Levels (to enable per access level); App Station > Settings > Content Settings > Meal Plans > Templates (or a plan's Layout tab) for Meal Mix.
Quick Start
Go to Settings in your App Station.
Select Access Levels.
Toggle Track calorie budget on for the desired access level.
In Content Settings, navigate to Meal Plans and select Templates or the Layout tab of a specific plan.
Enable Meal Mix if you want to provide a weekly tag breakdown.
Understanding Calorie Budget Tracking
Calorie budget tracking is a feature designed to help your members manage their calorie intake effectively. It allows them to set a daily calorie target on their meal plans and see how many calories they have left for the week. Here’s how it works:
Tier Requirement
Calorie budget tracking is available only for accounts on the Launch and Growth tiers. If your account is on the Discover tier, this feature will not be accessible.
Enabling Calorie Budget Tracking
As an admin, you need to enable calorie budget tracking for each access level. By default, this feature is turned off. To enable it:
Navigate to Access Levels in your App Station.
Select the access level you want to modify.
Toggle the Track calorie budget option to on.
This allows you to control which members can use this feature.
Member Visibility
Members will see their calorie budget tracking at the top of any meal plan they can edit. Additionally, there is a small inline indicator that appears when they add recipes to their meal plans.
Setting Daily Targets
Members can set their daily calorie target, which is used to calculate their remaining calories for the week. The calculation is as follows:
Weekly Remaining Calories = (Daily Target × Number of Days in the Plan) - (Calories of all meals and leftover sessions in the plan)
This means that if a member sets a target of 1500 calories per day for a 7-day meal plan, their weekly target would be 10,500 calories. As they add meals, the app will automatically update how many calories they have left.
Exclusions in Calculation
PREP Sessions: Any prep sessions are excluded from the calorie count to avoid double-counting ingredients that are prepped but not consumed.
Recipes without Nutrition Data: If a recipe lacks nutrition data, it will be silently excluded from the calorie calculations. Members will see a note indicating that some recipes have no nutrition data and are not counted.
Storage of Daily Targets
In this version, the daily calorie target is stored on the meal plan itself rather than on the member profile. This means that each meal plan can have its own target, and members will need to re-enter their target when creating a new plan.
Simplicity of the Feature
The calorie budget tracking feature is intentionally simple in this version. Members will see one number indicating how many calories are remaining for the week (e.g., "X cal remaining this week"). There is no breakdown by main meal versus snack, and no per-day override is available.
Meal Mix Feature
If your kitchen has calorie budget tracking enabled, you can also turn on the Meal Mix feature. This provides a weekly tag breakdown per meal plan template or in a plan's Layout tab. The Meal Mix section appears directly under the calorie summary, displaying how meals break down by selected tags. It does not require a calorie target to be set.