Real Plans was co-founded by Antony Bartlett and Emily Montes in 2014. By 2018, it was the 91st fastest growing private company in the United States and they celebrated the fact at the Inc 5000 conference.

The company was ‘boot-strapped’, (built without any investors) and represents the American story that hard work pays off. Emily’s understanding of nutrition and Antony’s technical expertise led to a cutting edge and celebrated service.

The company takes user input to design automated meal plans based on dietary restrictions. It partners with many top-tier recipe contributors who provide licensed recipes that can be purchased for an additional fee.

Real Plans remains a privately owned company and continues to prosper today, helping many thousands of subscribers to make good choices for themselves and their families.

How did Real Plans begin?

Emily – a.k.a. Holistic Squid wrote a Facebook quiz asking her readers what they would like her to do next… and one of the options was a weekly PDF real food meal plan… which, to cut a long story short, morphed into the Real Plans you see today.

Emily writes:

It seems like just yesterday that I fell in love with making home-cooked, real food for my family. I was so into it and wanted to do it all – simmer bone broth, master my slow cooker, even make ketchup and mayonnaise from scratch. But mostly I wanted to get delicious, home-cooked dinners on the table for my family. I soon realized I was going to need a plan to get it all done.

Over the years I have perfected meal planning and discovered hundreds of great recipes in the process.

While I can’t crawl through your computer screen and get to cooking in your kitchen, I have just the thing to share my secrets and help make your life easier.

The plans on Holistic Squid were a huge success, mostly because they removed the stress and monotony from the age-old question – “What’s for dinner?”

As time passed, I got great feedback from our meal plan subscribers – I noted and considered each and every request and comment.

Many folks asked for dietary modifications to recipes. Others wished the portion sizes were adjustable for their larger or smaller families. Still others dreamed of a mobile app to make their shopping trips easier.

Knowing I couldn’t do it all myself, I teamed up with my business partner Antony Bartlett, and together we created Real Plans…

Real Plans not only presents you with mouth-watering, nutritious, simple recipes, but you can also plan, cook, and shop the way that works best for you.

We know you don’t have hours to slave away in the kitchen each day, so we’ve carefully crafted our meal plans with recipes that are simple, easy to pull together, and turn out great.

As a real foodie and health practitioner, I’ve got a passion for food that is both scrumptious and deeply nutritious.

As a mom, it’s important to me that my family eats well and enjoys the meals I serve.

Our goal is not perfectly-plated works of art, but delicious, nutritious home-style meals that your family will love to eat.

We’ve got a recipe box brimming with over 3,000 tried-and-true, nutritious dishes that my whole family loves – and we know you’re going to love too.

(We’ve also teamed up with some of your favorite food bloggers to bring you even more delicious diversity.)

Antony writes:

Emily and I talked about the need for an online meal planner for PDF clients for many weeks and decided to go for it. So we threw everything we had at it. After a lot of time and resources we had our first version ready for launch.

It was clear the scope was quite large, but we could not afford to build everything all at once, so we started simply and built a service based on customer feedback. This iterative approach to development meant that we were building something that was relevant and fitted our subscriber’s idea of what is means to ‘meal plan’.

Real Plans has given me a lot of purpose in life. I have always been fascinated by computers and how they can change people’s lives. And this project was the perfect example of how a few 1s and 0s, can literally change the world for the better.