Meal Demand: one week, split by your plan options, with the boxes nobody has chosen yet

September 2, 2026

Meal Demand is the sheet a kitchen preps against, and three things could make it read wrong: a date range that spanned two menu weeks, no way to separate box sizes the app has no column for, and a count that ignored every box the customer had not chosen yet. All three are fixed, and the Orders page now moves week by week alongside it.

What changed

Meal Demand and Orders both step between delivery weeks instead of taking a free date range, and both name the same week the same way. Picking a range that crossed two menu periods used to add their dish counts together into a number nobody could cook against, while the printed labels carried only one of the two weeks' dates.

Both pages open on the week being packed rather than the week you are in. Your order cutoff is your own production lead time, so the moment a future week locks it is the week the kitchen is building. Shops with no cutoff configured see no change — they open on the current week as before.

The sheet can be split by the options on your own meal plan products. If you sell every meal count in two box sizes — a Format option with Regular and Supersize, say — those become filters on the kitchen sheet and on the label run, not just a total you cannot break down.

Unchosen boxes are no longer counted as zero. A banner always says how many boxes and roughly how many portions are still missing from the sheet, and a button works out where they land, resolving each box exactly the way the charge will. Chosen and projected portions are named separately, and the row shows the total the kitchen actually cooks against.

Boxes that auto-assign cannot fill get their own count and their own warning: they ship empty at the full plan price unless somebody picks for them.

Why it matters

On a slot auto-assign or evergreen shop an empty delivery is not an empty box — the charge fills it when it runs. Counting only what customers had chosen could read around 90% low for a week whose charges had not run yet, and the Orders page was already showing an expected count for that same week, so the two pages disagreed and whichever you opened first was the one you believed.

Splitting by your own options answers the question a total cannot: not how many portions of a dish, but how many of them are the large box.

How to use it

Open Meal Demand and use the week stepper to move between delivery weeks. Use the plan-option filters to narrow the sheet, and the projection button when a week's charges have not run yet and you need the full expected count before printing labels.

Open Orders the same way: one delivery week at a time, opened on the week being packed, with packing slips and counts scoped to it.