What Is Chop it? Every Part of the App, Explained

By Alex Fahey, founder of Chop it. Last updated 16 August 2026.

Chop it is an AI meal planning app and recipe organiser for iPhone that also runs inside ChatGPT. The short version: recipes come in from anywhere, AI turns them into a planned week, and the week becomes one shopping list checked against what your kitchen already holds.

This page walks through every part of the app, in the order they appear in its menu. If you want the case for the approach rather than the tour, start with Chop it vs ChatGPT.

New chat

An open conversation with the AI. Ask for ideas from what is in the fridge, adapt a recipe to a picky eater, or talk through the week. It is the same kind of exchange you would have in ChatGPT, with the guardrails applied: UK phrasing, metric quantities, and results that save as structured recipes rather than scrolling away as prose. Your recent conversations sit underneath it, so "bbq" or "high protein" from last week is one tap away.

This Week

The weekly plan, and the centre of the app. Recipes from any source land here as the week's dinners, each scalable to the number of people eating. The week persists: open it on Thursday and it is still there, which is the part a ChatGPT conversation cannot do. A finished week can be shared as a link, so the household sees the same plan.

My Recipes

Your library. Everything you have saved, whatever direction it arrived from: a photographed cookbook page, a pasted website link, a TikTok or Instagram video, or something the AI wrote for you. Each becomes a structured recipe card with ingredients, method and macros, searchable when you want it again in March. The capture routes are covered in detail in how to save recipes from anywhere.

Chef IQ Recipes

The Chef IQ catalogue: ready-made recipes you can browse or ask for in plain language, and the same catalogue is public at chop-it.com/recipes, organised by cuisine and collection. Menus assembled from it are staged for plant variety, with fibre and protein kept high by design.

Recipe Generator

One-shot creation. Where New chat converses, the Generator takes your request and produces a finished recipe card in a single step: ingredients with real quantities, a method you can cook from, macros and the Weekly Diversity Score. Use it when you know what you want and need the recipe, not a discussion.

Collections

Recipes grouped into sets by the job they do, the same way the website's collections group quick weeknight dinners or batch cooking. A way to keep the library browsable once it grows past what memory holds.

Pantry

What your kitchen holds: fridge, freezer and cupboards. The philosophy is automatic management: the record maintains itself from what you already do. It updates itself as you add shops, photographed or bought. Ingredients come off it when you mark a meal cooked, and back on if you unmark it. Every item gets a default planning reminder matched to its type, from days for fish to a fortnight for hardy veg, and is flagged before it becomes phantom spinach. Packaging instructions and labelled use-by dates always take precedence. For anything bulk, the chat takes one instruction: say "empty my fridge" and the app lists what would go, then clears it on your confirmation.

The pantry feeds the two features that depend on knowing what you own: recipe suggestions that start from your ingredients rather than a shopping trip, and the shorter shopping list below. The full pantry page covers the mechanics; the thinking behind pantry-first cooking is in our food waste guide.

Shop

The week's shopping list, built rather than written. Every ingredient across the planned recipes merges into single lines with totals, grouped for the supermarket, with what the pantry already holds subtracted. When you are ready to buy, the list can hand off to Whisk for online ordering. The mechanics are explained in how AI shopping lists work.

Chop it GPT

The door to the same product inside ChatGPT. Plan a week or create recipes in a ChatGPT conversation and open the results in the app. Signing in to your Chop it account inside ChatGPT is not live yet, so the handoff is explicit for now.

What it costs

Free to start. AI features run on credits, because the app pays for those AI calls itself; Pro at £3.99 a month or £34.99 a year adds 100 monthly credits, and one-off credit packs exist for people who dislike subscriptions. Image generation uses separate credits. The app is iPhone-only today, with no Android version.

Frequently asked questions