I was looking at various services that send you the ingredients and recipes for meals, so one doesn't have to think, and I realized what kind of service I really want. I don't mind shopping, and I would rather buy in bulk than pay for individual meal's ingredients, and the tough part is picking out what to make. My dream service would basically be a meal-planning service.
It would comprise of three things: picking out recipes based on a taste/preferences profile which would get further developed as one uses the service, picking recipes that use in-season ingredients, and then sorting the meals and building shopping lists that allow the buyer to save by getting the bulk option and shopping at places like Costco.
The basic meal choices might be the simplest part. It could start with asking what ethnic origins the users enjoy or dislike, how spicy they like their food, and if there's anything that they want to blacklist. Then, by having a way to score what was prepared, the users could give input to further fine-tune their choices. It would need a fairly large library of food choices to begin with, so even after a lot of fine-tuning, users would still have enough recipes that they don't have to repeat meals too often.
The system would need to know the user's general location, so that it could have an idea of what foods are grown more locally, and when they are available. If the recipes chosen adjust themselves on a monthly basis, avoiding the produce that it out of season and imported from faraway places, costs could be kept lower. Come to think of it, the system could have a setting for how cost-conscious the users are, and use that to drive a lot of the choices.
I would probably have the system give the users at least two weeks of planning in advance, and then when it builds their shopping lists, it can give quantities and amounts of the different products to buy, knowing what will be used multiple times. It could say, for example, "buy the 10 kg bag of potatoes", with the knowledge that in the time that those potatoes should be edible, they are scheduled to be eaten.
Someone, please, build this system, and I'll sign up.