At a glance:
~75% less time spent on admin each week
2–4 hours weekly now vs. up to 16 before
4+ years as a Member Kitchens customer
Peas & Hoppiness is a meal planning membership app founded by registered dietitian Ann Kent, who writes every recipe and meal plan on the platform. The app focuses on heart health, anti-inflammation, and blood sugar management — with the goal of making nutritionally complete, delicious food genuinely easy to get on the table. Members receive not just recipes but planning, shopping, and family coordination tools built around real-life dinnertime.
The challenge
Ann built Peas & Hoppiness on a clear mission: help families eat well without making the main meal planner carry the whole load alone. But for a long time, the back-end reality of running the membership pulled her away from that mission entirely.
Every recipe lived in one program. Nutrition analysis happened in another. Shopping lists were assembled by hand. At the end of it all, she was converting everything into PDFs and figuring out how to get them into a format she could send to subscribers. The work was relentless and repetitive — and hers alone to do.
As Ann explains, "Easily at least eight hours a week, probably double that." At the high end, that is roughly 16 hours every week spent on operational tasks that had nothing to do with writing better recipes or serving members better. The shopping list alone was a significant drain: every plan required a manually compiled list, cross-referenced against the recipes, before a single subscriber could use it.
Even after she moved to a different meal planning tool, the problem did not go away. The platform helped, but it still required substantial back-end work to produce something sendable. The gap between what Ann wanted to offer her members and what the tools allowed her to deliver kept widening. She needed a system that could hold the whole workflow — not just one piece of it.
The solution
Ann found Member Kitchens early in the life of Peas & Hoppiness, and the timing shaped everything that followed. Rather than inheriting years of workarounds to undo, she was able to build her membership operation inside the platform from the start. That decision, made several years ago, is still paying off today.
Ann brought her existing recipes and meal plans into the system and found that the platform was built to receive them. Shopping list generation, which had been one of her biggest manual burdens, became automatic. Serving adjustments, recipe swaps, and meal plan customization were all handled inside the same environment, so members could interact with the content rather than just receive it.
The platform also connected directly to Instacart and Walmart, which meant members could move from a finalized meal plan to a grocery order without leaving the app. For Ann, that integration was not a minor convenience — it was a direct extension of her core goal of making healthy eating genuinely easier for real families.
What has kept Ann on the platform for years is not just the feature set but the way it keeps evolving. "I really appreciate how they integrate member feedback and continue to improve the platform," she says. "It just keeps getting better and better."
The results
The most immediate change after moving to Member Kitchens was the recovery of Ann's time. What had consumed as much as 16 hours a week came down to 2 to 4 hours. The hours that remain are spent on things that matter: updating recipes, optimizing new features for members, and refining the content that makes Peas & Hoppiness worth subscribing to. The platform handles the rest.
The member experience changed just as meaningfully. Before Member Kitchens, subscribers received a PDF. Now they receive a full planning environment: customizable meal plans, automatic shopping lists, recipe search, serving adjustments, ratings, reviews, and direct grocery ordering through Instacart and Walmart.
Ann hears about this directly from her members. The shopping list and grocery integrations come up consistently as favorites. So does the ability to search recipes and the flexibility to swap or delete meals and build custom plans.
There is also a dimension to the results that goes beyond Ann's own workflow. Her mission as a registered dietitian has always included teaching the whole family to cook — not just the person who usually plans the meals. Member Kitchens makes that possible in a practical way: one family member can plan, another can shop from the shared list, and a third can pull up the recipe and start cooking.
The bottom line
Ann came to Member Kitchens with a clear vision and a workflow that could not support it. Today, Peas & Hoppiness runs on a platform that handles the operational weight so she can focus on the work only she can do: writing recipes, building meal plans, and helping families eat better together.
For any registered dietitian or wellness creator sitting on a library of recipes and wondering how to turn it into a real membership business, Ann's advice is direct: the infrastructure already exists, and it is far less expensive than building it yourself.
"Member Kitchens allows you to create a meal planning membership almost in a box. You can take all the recipes and meal plans that you already have, plug them into their system, and roll out your meal planning subscription."
— Ann Kent, Founder and Registered Dietitian, Peas & Hoppiness
"In comparison to trying to create an app from scratch," she adds, "this platform has all of the features, makes it super easy, and is so much less expensive than trying to find a developer to create an app on your own."