Editorial trust
How the content is made, limits included.
Recipes, translations, cost estimates and the parts a machine wrote. Here is the process behind each one, in the detail we would want from somebody else's site.
Recipes
Where the recipes come from
The recipe library is Portuguese home cooking, written in house. It is not clipped or scraped from other sites, and it is not a general world-cuisine catalogue with a Portuguese section.
The canon is written down. We keep a set of cuisine rules covering the things a Portuguese cook notices immediately: which rice belongs in a wet dish and which belongs on the side, how much meat a portion actually needs, when breadcrumbs are the wrong answer and soaked bread is the right one. Those rules exist because a Portuguese cook read through our library and told us what was off, and every recipe we add is held to them.
Cook times, portions and protein per portion are the recipe author's estimates, not laboratory measurements. Recipe photographs are AI-generated and are there to show you roughly what the dish looks like. They are not a record of a cook we carried out.
Translation
How the English version is produced, plainly
This is the disclosure that matters most on the English side of the site, so it gets said without hedging.
The recipes were written in Portuguese by a person, and that Portuguese is the original rather than a translation of an English draft. The English text you read on a recipe page is machine translation of it, and for the large majority of recipes no person has reviewed the result yet.
We publish it anyway, and that was a deliberate call rather than an oversight. What we will not do is imply a human review that has not happened, so: treat an English recipe as a good machine rendering of a human-written Portuguese recipe, not as text an editor has been over line by line.
- 1Written in Portuguese
A person writes the recipe against the cuisine rules above. That original is the version a human stands behind.
- 2Translated by machine
The English row is generated from it. Each recipe carries a flag recording that the row is machine output and has not been reviewed.
- 3Published only when complete
An English page goes live only when the translation covers every field the page renders, so you never get an English page with Portuguese showing through. Completeness is checked. Quality of phrasing is not.
- 4Reviewed over time
The flag is what a reviewer works through. When a recipe has been read by a person, its flag comes off. Most have not been reached yet.
The Portuguese pages carry no such caveat, because the Portuguese is the original.
Money
What a cost figure on this site actually is
PlanMyMeals prices a shopping list before you shop, which is unusual enough that it is worth being exact about what the number is and is not.
Lists are costed against price books for Continente, Auchan and Pingo Doce, and the same list is priced across all three so you can see where it lands cheaper. Not every line has a price from every chain, so the list tells you how many of its lines carry that chain's own price.
The total is an estimate, not your actual spend. Prices move, promotions exist, package sizes differ by store, and what you put in the trolley is not always what was on the list. A weekly budget in the product is a target the plan is built against, not a promise about the receipt.
Any figure on an editorial page that comes from the product is a worked example with its assumptions stated, not a benchmark you should expect to reproduce exactly.
AI
Where a model is used, and where it is not
Plenty of planners describe themselves as AI powered without saying which part. Here is the split.
Generating your weekly plan. It runs on the household's own settings and deterministic rules, so the same inputs give the same week. Swap suggestions work the same way, identically on every plan tier.
Writing a brand new recipe on request, importing a recipe from a link, the on-demand button that asks for more swap ideas, translating recipe text between Portuguese and English, and generating the recipe photographs.
The editorial pages on this site, including this one, are written by us. Where a model helped draft a passage, a person is still the one publishing it and is answerable for it.
Updates and corrections
Dates that mean a real change
An update date changes when we revise the text, a source, a figure or the described behaviour. Reformatting a file is not an update, and neither is editing a different page in the same module.
To ask for a correction, send the page, the passage and, where there is one, the better source to support@planmymeals.ai. We fix factual errors as soon as we can confirm them.
See the method applied