Your meal plan, made automatically.
“What are we eating this week?” is a question that comes up fifty-two times a year. Popotam can answer it for you: it puts together your menu and your grocery list on the day you pick, and lets you know when it's ready. Free, no account needed, and we explain exactly what happens behind the scenes.
What it changes for you
The real cost of a weekly menu isn't the ten minutes it takes to make. It's having to think about it. Sunday night creeping up, opening the fridge with zero ideas, ending the week with pizza because nobody planned anything.
Once automatic generation is on, that mental load disappears. On the day you picked, Popotam puts together fourteen meals, lunch and dinner, based on your budget, the number of people, your dietary restrictions and what you've eaten lately. It builds the grocery list from that, sorted by aisle. You don't open anything, you don't copy anything: the week is there when you come back.
And you can still edit it like any other week. A dish you're not feeling, you swap it. A week that doesn't work, you redo it. Popotam suggests, it doesn't impose.
Popotam generates, or your AI does
Popotam offers two ways to put together a menu, and lots of people mix them up. Here's the difference, it's simple.
“Popotam handles it”
Popotam calls its AI and writes the menu. One click, nothing to copy, nothing to paste. It's the only mode that can work without you, so it's the only one that allows automatic generation: to work while you're not around, someone has to hold the pen.
“My AI”
Popotam writes the prompt, you paste it into your ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude, and you bring back the answer. Nothing leaves Popotam, and it costs nobody anything. On the other hand, this mode needs you there, since you're the one going back and forth.
You switch from one to the other in one click, in the Data tab, and nothing gets lost along the way. Your history, your preferences and your meal plan stay the same.
Turn it on in 2 minutes
Save your meal plan online
Click “Save my meal plan”. Popotam saves it online, behind a secret link only you know. That's where it'll drop your weeks: without that save, it has nowhere to write.
Pick your day
In Preferences, set your weekly reminder day. That's the day Popotam will make the following week. Lots of people pick the day before their grocery run.
Turn on automatic generation
In the Data tab, under “Your next week, without thinking about it”, click “Turn on auto generation”. That's it. You turn it off in the same spot, in one click, whenever you want.
Get a heads-up when it's ready
A planned week that nobody sees is useless. So right after you turn it on, Popotam offers to email you as soon as your menu is ready. You get a short message with a preview of the dishes and the link to your meal plan: you know what to buy before you even open the app.
Three commitments that come with it, and won't change: no newsletter, no marketing, no reselling. Nothing gets sent until you confirm your address by clicking the link you receive, every message has an unsubscribe link that deletes your address in one click without touching your meal plan, and an address that's never confirmed disappears on its own after seven days.
What gets sent, and to whom
This question deserves a precise answer, so here it is, straight up. To put together your menu, Popotam calls OpenAI's GPT-6 Luna, currently the model that best follows constraints as detailed as yours (we'll go back to Mistral AI, a French company, as soon as it offers one that performs as well; it's already our backup). Here's exactly what it sends:
- the number of people at the table;
- your target budget and your cart optimization level;
- your dietary restrictions (no pork, vegetarian, allergies…);
- the names of dishes not to repeat, taken from your recent history.
Neither the prompt sent nor the menu received is stored by Popotam. The meal plan gets written online, and that's it. Popotam only keeps a technical log of the call (duration, cost, status), which contains no data about you and is deleted after 180 days.
If you'd rather nothing gets sent at all, “My AI” mode is there for that: in that case Popotam sends nothing anywhere. All the details are in the privacy policy, which lists the recipients, the retention periods and how to exercise your rights.
What Popotam doesn't do
A page that only talks about the good stuff doesn't deserve your trust. Here are the limits, stated just as clearly as the rest.
- It doesn't order your groceries. Popotam isn't tied to any store and takes no commission. It gives you a list sorted by aisle, and you shop wherever you want.
- It doesn't know your fridge. It plans from your preferences, not from an inventory of what you already have. It's up to you to cross off what you've got.
- It's not a dietitian. The menus are balanced in the everyday sense, they don't replace nutritional follow-up, and Popotam gives no medical advice.
- AI sometimes gets things wrong. A dish that makes no sense or a weird quantity, it happens. That's why you can swap a dish in one click, or redo the whole week.
- It doesn't generate anything unless you ask. Automatic generation is off by default, and stays that way until you turn it on.
The automatic pause
If you stop opening Popotam for a few weeks, generation pauses on its own. It's not a punishment, it's common sense: making menus nobody will read wastes electricity and money, and fills up your inbox for no reason.
Why it's free
Each generation costs Popotam less than a cent. That's little enough not to charge you anything, and that's the only reason. There's no trial period, no paid tier, and no limit on the number of weeks generated.
Popotam shows no ads, sells no data and takes no store commission. If the service ever got too expensive to stay this way, it would be said here, ahead of time, and “My AI” mode would stay free forever anyway, since it costs nobody anything.
Frequently asked questions
Open your meal plan, go to the Data tab, under “Your next week, without thinking about it”, and click “Turn on auto generation”. Your meal plan has to be saved online, since that's where Popotam drops the week. You turn it off in one click in the same spot.
Automatic generation runs on Popotam's AI: that's what can work while you're not around. “My AI” mode, where you paste the prompt into your own ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude, is still available anytime, but it needs you there since you're the one going back and forth. You switch between modes in one click, without losing anything.
The day you picked in your preferences, under “weekly reminder day”. By default it's Monday. Popotam then makes the FOLLOWING week during the day, and you find it ready when you open the app.
If you ask for it, yes, by email. It's optional and you can turn it off in one click. Without an address, generation works exactly the same: your week is just there when you open Popotam. The address is only used for that and to get your link back: no newsletter, no marketing, no reselling.
Never. Automatic generation only writes the following week. Your current week, the meals you've already checked off and your grocery list aren't touched.
Popotam skips it. A week you already generated by hand, or planned by asking for your whole month, never gets redone on top: automatic generation only handles the weeks that are missing.
The number of people, your target budget, your cart optimization level, your dietary restrictions and the names of dishes not to repeat. Never your email address, never your meal plan's ID, never anything that could identify you. The provider is OpenAI (GPT-6 Luna model), currently the one that follows your constraints best, with Mistral AI, a French company, as backup.
No, and it won't. Each generation costs Popotam less than a cent, and Popotam shows no ads and sells no data. There's no free trial, no paid tier, and no limit on the number of weeks.
Generation pauses on its own after a few weeks without a visit, so it doesn't make menus nobody will read. Nothing gets deleted: your meal plan, your preferences, your history and your address stay intact, and one click gets it going again.
No, that's actually what the history is for. Popotam keeps track of what you've eaten lately and sends it as a list of dishes to avoid. The more you use it, the more it knows what you've already had.
Are you a developer? Popotam has two routes to plug in your own agent and generate with your own AI key: see API and integrations.