The Weekly Diversity Score: What It Measures and What It Does Not

By Alex Fahey, founder of Chop it. Last updated 5 August 2026.

Definition. The Weekly Diversity Score is Chop it's view of variety across a planned week: how many different plants the week contains, and how it sits for fibre and protein. It reads the recipes on your plan and updates as the plan changes. It is directional guidance on variety, nothing more.

What it measures

Three things, read from the week you have planned rather than from anything you log:

Plants. A count of the different plant foods across the week's recipes. Herbs, spices, nuts and grains all count as distinct plants, the same way the 30-plants-a-week idea counts them. The point is variety: a week of five dinners that all lean on onion, tomato and wheat scores as narrow, however good each dinner is.

Fibre and protein. How the planned week sits against the fibre and protein a week of eating would want, drawn from each recipe's macros. Menus that Chop it assembles are staged with these kept high by design; the score is how you see where a week you built yourself has landed.

The week, not the day. The score reads the whole plan. One indulgent dinner moves it a little; the shape of the week moves it a lot, which matches how eating varies in real households.

What it deliberately is not

It is not a health assessment, and the distinction is written into the product. The score does not diagnose anything, track your body, or claim outcomes. It shows repetition and narrowness in a planned week so you can vary the plan if you want to. Nutrition figures behind it are estimates, as the terms say plainly.

The reason for the restraint: variety is the one dimension a planning app can read honestly from recipes alone. Anything further would be claiming knowledge of you that a meal plan does not contain.

How it fits the rest of the app

The score reads This Week, so anything that changes the plan changes the score: a recipe swapped in from your library, a generated recipe, a Chef IQ pick. Menus assembled in ChatGPT arrive already staged for plant variety, so the score tends to start high and your edits move it from there.

Frequently asked questions