Cook Sessions & Leftovers: Cutting Grocery Waste by 48%
Why counting cooks instead of sittings is the missing piece of meal planning.
Most meal planning software suffers from a fatal blind spot: it treats every meal sitting as an isolated cooking event. If a recipe serves four people and you eat it twice, naive software tells you to buy ingredients for eight portions.
1. The 67.6kg vs. 34.8kg Benchmark
In our initial verification test simulating a household of four for one week, a naive sitting-by-sitting shopping list called for 67.6kg of groceries across 38 distinct ingredient lines.
When we introduced cook-session intelligence — recognizing that cooking a 4-serving dish once creates two dinners and two next-day lunches — the required grocery weight collapsed to 34.8kg without reducing caloric intake or dietary variety by a single calorie.
2. Leftover Chains
Repast links dinner and lunch into explicit leftover chains. Monday night's Pan-seared Salmon or Roast Chicken automatically carries a reserved portion for Wednesday lunch.
The app's shopping list aggregates by whole cook sessions, preventing duplicate purchases and eliminating the refrigerator rot that plagues ambitious weekly cooking routines.
3. Purchasable Units Over Raw Grams
Recipes require precision in grams (e.g. 180g of salmon fillet per portion), but supermarket supply chains sell in packs. Telling a shopper to buy '720g of egg' creates hesitation in the aisle.
Repast converts recipe requirements into purchasable units: '1 carton of 12 large eggs', '2 packs of 4 avocados', and '500g bundle of asparagus'.
Cook once, eat twice. Your meal planner should consolidate whole cook sessions into a single aisle-grouped grocery list.
Cook once, eat twice. Eliminate refrigerator food waste.
Repast links your week's cooking sessions into seamless leftover chains and routes your shopping into 7 store aisles.
Streamline your kitchen on iPhone