🔒 Meal plans are available on our Premium and Professional packages. Recurring meal plans are available on our Professional package only. Learn more about pricing here!
Meal plans let you create and publish digital menus for your nursery, whether you're planning for the week ahead or further into the future. You can build your menu in draft, then publish it when you're ready for parents and staff to see it.
Where to Find Meal Plans
To find meal plans on a desktop:
Click the Home icon in your sidebar
Select Meal plans
On a smartphone or tablet:
Tap the Menu icon (three horizontal lines) in your bottom bar
Tap Home, then Meal plans
You'll be taken to your meal plans overview, which shows a breakdown of every meal plan at your nursery.
Meal Settings
Before creating your first meal plan, it's worth setting up your meal types and meal items in Settings.
Meal Types
Meal types are the categories of meals your nursery provides, for example, Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, and Snacks.
To set these up:
Go to Settings in your sidebar and click Meal plans
Click Add meal type and add as many as you need
Assign each meal type a colour, use the arrows on the right to reorder them, or the bin icon to delete them
Click Save when you're done
Meal Items
Meal items are the individual dishes and foods your setting provides, such as pasta bolognese or fruit salad. These are used in meal registrations and meal plans. Any items added through meal registrations or meal plans will also appear here.
When adding a new meal item, you can optionally specify which allergens it contains, so parents and staff can see at a glance which meals include allergens.
💡 Allergens can only be added to newly created meal items. You won't be able to add allergens to existing meal items
Creating a Meal Plan
Once your meal types are set up, you're ready to create a meal plan:
Click the Home icon in your sidebar and select Meal plans
Click Create meal plan and give your meal plan a name
Add the period the meal plan will cover
Choose Create meal plan to enter your meal plan manually, or Upload meal plan to upload a file instead
💡 The upload option is handy if your catering provider already sends you a meal plan PDF, so you don't have to enter it all manually
Use the Assign to dropdown to select who the meal plan is for:
Specific rooms
Specific tags
Specific children
If it's not for a specific group or child, click on Select all
To add meal items:
Click the + icon on a day of the week and add your items to the relevant meal types
If the same meals repeat across weeks, click + Add week at the bottom of the current week, then the Duplicate icon
and select which weeks you'd like to copy them toUse the Schedule section to choose when your meal plan goes live
Saving and Publishing Meal Plans
While editing a meal plan, you'll be in draft mode. Drafts are visible to staff with the Manage meal plans permission, but not to parents. Once you're happy with your menu, click Publish to make it visible to parents and all staff.
Once published, you can still edit details like the length, type (recurring or non-recurring), or who the meal plan is assigned to by clicking on Edit.
💡 If a child has more than one meal plan assigned to them, Famly will display the most recently created one
Viewing and Printing Meal Plans
Published meal plans open in a clean view mode, showing all meal details including allergens at a glance. From here you can:
Click Edit to switch to the editor if you need to make changes
Go to Options, then Print to print a landscape week grid, handy for keeping a copy in the kitchen
To access this view, go to Home, then Meal plans, and open a published plan.
Recurring Meal Plans
On the Professional package, you can set up recurring meal plans that repeat on a schedule of your choosing, whether that's weekly, every two weeks, every six weeks, or anything in between. You can also set a start and end date for when the recurring plan should run.
To create a recurring meal plan:
Click Create meal plan
In the Plan type section, select Recurring (alternatively, toggle on the Does meal plan repeat in the previous step)
Choose a start and end date in the Schedule section if you didn't do so already
💡 If you edit a published recurring meal plan, the changes will apply retrospectively. If you don't want to affect past records, create a new meal plan instead
Sharing Meal Plans with Parents
Once published, parents can view the meal plan in their calendar.
If a meal plan isn't showing for a parent, it may be because another meal plan is overriding it. For example, if a child has an individual meal plan (even an empty one), that will take priority. To fix this, remove the empty individual meal plan so Famly can fall back to the correct one.
Famly displays meal plans based on the following priority order:
By child (even if the meal plan is empty)
By tag (even if the meal plan is empty)
By room (even if the meal plan is empty)
Everyone else (only shown if none of the above apply)
Parents will only see a meal plan in their calendar if their child is assigned to it and it is currently active. In their calendars, they can click on each meal to expand the menu.
Removing Meal Items
There are two ways to remove a meal item depending on your nursery's setup.
Via the room overview:
Click the Home icon in your sidebar and select Overview
Click into a room and select a child
Click Meal from the menu that appears
Hover over the meal item you'd like to remove and click the bin icon
Via Settings:
Go to Settings in your sidebar and click Meal plans
Scroll down to the Meal items section
Click the × next to the item you'd like to remove
Archiving Meal Plans
If you're no longer using a meal plan, you can archive it to keep it in your records without it applying to any rooms, tags, or children. Archiving hides the meal plan from parents and staff from the date it's archived onwards. To archive a meal plan, click the Archive icon next to it and confirm.
You can view archived meal plans by selecting Archived from the Plan status dropdown.
Frequently Asked Questions
What app version is required to use meal plans?
You'll need app version 157 or above to use meal plans.
How far back can I view historic meal plans?
You can view up to one year of past meal plans. If you need records beyond that, get in touch via the in-app chat or at support@famly.co with the name or URL of the meal plan and the time period you need.
A meal plan isn't showing up for parents or staff when logging meals. Why?
Check that you don't have multiple published meal plans scheduled at the same time for the same child, room, or tag. If one of them is empty, Famly may be displaying that instead.
We're using the Meal Plans API but no meal plans are showing up.
If you're using the Meal Plans API to display meal plans on your website, make sure to check the All children without a meal plan box. Only meal plans assigned to this option will appear via the API.