Our story

How it started

We met through friends one November weekend in Whistler, had our first date that December, and less than a year later we were starting a business together. The idea for Mealime came to us on the SkyTrain (Vancouver’s elevated metro system). We were always tired after work, and dinner kept turning into takeout or frozen meals from the grocery store. Most meal planning services we found were built for families, and we wanted something for people like us: singles and couples cooking for one or two.

So we started small. In January 2013 we put up a simple website and emailed meal plans to people as PDFs (without even any photos!). We cooked every recipe ourselves first, and the grocery list went out every Saturday. That spring, Jeffrey wrote a guest post for Lifehacker, and 4,000 people signed up for an extended free trial. That’s when we knew this might really be something. That summer, Jeffrey quit his job, and for a while we lived in Maria’s parents’ basement to make it work.

Growing Mealime

From there we started testing and photographing every recipe, and in 2014 we rebuilt Mealime from scratch as a web app, with personalized plans and a grocery list you could check off. Our friend Mitch Crowe joined us as a technical partner and later became a co-founder. But you can’t bring your laptop to the grocery store, so in 2016 we went all in on the mobile app. Apple featured it in its first week, and it kept growing from there, well beyond singles and couples to households of every size. More than 7 million people have used Mealime.

Letting it go

Selling Mealime in 2018 was a hard decision, because it was our baby. But after years of pushing to make it work, we were burnt out, and it was the right call for us at the time. We sold it to a private equity company and expected it to keep running under them for many years, so it was a surprise when it was sold again, to Albertsons, in 2021.

Even years later, we’d meet people who used Mealime, or a friend would tell us their coworker swore by it. It always felt a little surreal. And we never stopped thinking about all the things we still wished we could make better.

What changed

After Mealime, Jeffrey learned to code, and in 2020 we launched Clearful, a journaling app that went on to be an App Store Editor’s Choice. Then our daughter was born in 2025, and meal planning got a lot more interesting. Some meals we cook for all three of us, some just for her, and some just for the two of us. We prep our lunches so they’re easy to grab from the fridge, we cook dinner every other night and eat the leftovers the next, and she has her own breakfasts, lunches and snacks. There’s a lot to juggle when you want to feed everyone well.

Why Cookroom, and why now

We’d been thinking about a new meal planner for a long time, and the itch got a lot stronger once our daughter arrived. We even had the name. We tried others (we even asked AI for ideas, and they were pretty terrible), but we kept coming back to Cookroom. Then in September 2026, a longtime Mealime user wrote to tell us Mealime was shutting down. That was the first we’d heard of it, and it was quite sad to read. Within a day, we decided to go all in.

How we build

We build products for problems in our own lives that nothing quite solves, and we obsess over the details, down to the smallest moments, because that’s what makes an app a joy to use every day. Cookroom gets to follow in Mealime’s footsteps while starting fresh, and we finally get to make all the improvements we always wished we could. It should be ready to try before the end of the year, and we’d love for you to come along.