ha-mealie-now-serving — Time-Aware Meal Plan Carousel for Home Assistant + Mealie
Hey everyone! I've been running Mealie as my self-hosted recipe manager and wanted a smarter way to display my meal plan on my Home Assistant kitchen dashboard. What started as a simple "show today's dinner" card turned into a fully time-aware, auto-advancing image carousel that I'm now sharing with the community.
What it does
The card automatically shows the right meal slot based on the current time:
Before 10am → shows breakfast recipes
10am–3pm → shows lunch recipes
After 3pm → shows supper (dinner + sides + dessert combined)
Each slot is an auto-advancing image slideshow that cycles through all the recipes planned for that meal. Empty slots are automatically hidden, and you can swipe manually too. A recipe name overlay sits at the bottom of each slide.
Demo
What you need
- Mealie (self-hosted, tested on v3.19.2)
- Home Assistant 2025.1.0 or later
- Mealie Integration (built-in, no HACS needed)
- Simple Swipe Card (HACS Frontend)
- card-mod (HACS Frontend)
How it works
The package file adds:
- REST sensors that poll your Mealie meal plan every 10 minutes
- Template image entities that pull recipe images directly from Mealie
- A time-aware template sensor (
sensor.mealie_meal_slot) that switches between breakfast/lunch/supper based on the current hour
The Lovelace card uses Simple Swipe Card with conditional visibility so only the current meal slot is shown, and only slides with planned recipes are displayed.
Setup is designed to be as painless as possible — drop one file into your packages/ folder, create a Text helper with your Mealie URL, add your API token to secrets.yaml, restart, and paste the Lovelace YAML into a manual card.
Supports
- Up to 4 breakfast items
- Up to 4 lunch items
- Up to 6 supper items (dinner + sides + dessert all grouped together)
Use Cases
I built this for my home kitchen but it could work anywhere meals are displayed communally:
-
Cottage / vacation rental — show the week's meal plan for guests on arrival -
B&B / boutique hotel — breakfast menu board in the dining room -
Community kitchen — coordinate shared cooking across a group -
Home kitchen — wall-mounted tablet in kiosk mode showing what's for each meal
Future ideas include tomorrow's meals shown after 8pm, dietary flag icons from Mealie tags, and a multi-day menu board view.
GitHub
github.com/bferd/ha-mealie-now-serving
Full installation instructions, customization options, and troubleshooting are all in the README.
Would love to hear feedback, suggestions, or if anyone runs into issues.
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