3 ratings made it into the UK food chart's top 50: Scoffy didn't break out, the chart is just shallow and this niche is already crowded

On 2026 October 31 at 5:39 pm, a newly created Facebook page "Scoffy - Meal Planner" posted a Reel: "Set your budget, Scoffy plans your week's meals, and the recipes and full shopping list are priced at the supermarket you actually use." Below it, a checklist: ASDA, Tesco, Sainsbury's, Aldi, Morrisons, Waitrose, Iceland, M&S, Ocado. Three days later, this app, only six weeks old, climbed to #38 on the UK App Store Food & Drink Top Grossing chart, with just 1 ratings at the time. This piece explains how that ranking happened, who is actually earning money from "pick a supermarket + set a budget → weekly menu" apps, and whether you can still get in.

What Scoffy is

It's built by UK indie developer Sahal Adan, who has only this one app under his name, launched in 2026 September 22, English only, listed only in the UK. There is no website; the privacy policy sits in a repo on his personal GitHub named rilo-food-legal. He previously made an AI flashcard app called "Rilo AI - Smart Flashcards", now removed, and moved from vocabulary to food.

How it works: you tell it how many days to plan (1 to 7 days, or just Mon/Wed/Fri), which meals you want (e.g. only breakfast and lunch), how many people, your budget, which supermarket you shop at, dietary restrictions and allergies, and what's already in your fridge. It picks from a set of existing recipes and outputs a day-by-day menu and a shopping list priced at that supermarket. There's also "Cook Up": take a photo of your fridge and get one dish you can make. No account is needed to start.

Pricing is a hard paywall: you can set up and preview the first plan for free, but everything after requires a Scoffy Pro subscription: £7.99 per week, £34.99 per year, first-year promo £24.99 (UK App Store page, 11-06). The 5 November 1.0.6 update notes say only "see highlights of your new plan right away", which changed the preview step before the paywall.

How it reached #38

First, its ranking on the UK Food & Drink category chart (App Store UK, 10-31 to 11-06):

Two things line up. First, the jump started right after the Facebook Reel went out. It hit the top and then fell back to #50 to #80, which looks like a single paid-ad pulse, not word of mouth compounding. Its store privacy label also says it uses "purchase history, identifiers" to track you across apps, the typical sign of ad attribution being wired in.

Second, this chart is shallow. On the 6 Nov chart, #49 has only 4 ratings, #51 has only 1 ratings, and #47 has 11. A few weekly and annual subscriptions a day is enough to reach the top 50. Scoffy has appeared on the Top Free chart only once (11-03, #199), which means downloads are tiny and a hard paywall turns the few downloads it gets straight into revenue. That's why it shows up on Top Grossing rather than Top Free. Going by the size of its chart neighbors, its daily revenue is probably in the tens of pounds (estimate, unverified).

Searching for Scoffy on TikTok, X, Reddit, Product Hunt, and in the media turns up nothing. The only known acquisition channel is Reels ads on Meta. How many ads ran and for how long is not visible from outside.

This has already been done by a dozen-plus players this summer

What's actually worth watching isn't Scoffy but the niche behind it. Since June 2026, a string of apps with nearly the same template has appeared in the UK Food & Drink Top Grossing top 50: "tell us where you shop, your budget, household size, dietary needs → weekly menu + priced shopping list."

Even later entrants exist: Grocely (launched 2026-10-27) has a store description that nearly mirrors Scoffy sentence by sentence ("pick your supermarket, set a budget… free to download, paid subscription required") and lists the same six or seven supermarkets, and it has already reached #109 on the Top Grossing chart. Rather than copying Scoffy, everyone seems to be copying Whipp and mise.

Some assume that "pricing by supermarket" requires proprietary local retail data, and that this is a barrier. The table suggests otherwise: at least seven or eight apps are doing it, UK supermarket prices have existing price-comparison sources, and a small app called Basketr compared 10 supermarkets single-handedly. Scoffy's claim to add the list "item by item" into supermarket online carts most likely means jumping to the supermarket website and searching each item one by one, not a real API (inference, not verified by installing the app).

Scoffy's own differences, supporting Iceland, M&S and Ocado, freely choosing days and number of servings, recipes from a fridge photo, no sign-up, are all details, not the reason it charted.

What the apps that made money did right

Got there first. Whipp and mise both launched in June, timed to when UK cost-of-living pressure was at its peak and "budget grocery shopping" resonated most. Both reached #1 on the Food & Drink Top Grossing chart.

Flooded TikTok, not just Meta. Searching TikTok for mise turns up a long string of "eating / meal prep" accounts posting the same kind of video: kenzieeatsss posted "I wish I knew about this sooner" in October 24, 275k views; the official account posted one in June 13 with 879k views. There are also accounts like tom.cooks.more, tom.cooks.more5 and charlie.cooks.more that are clearly opened in batches, posting daily in mid-June with captions like "this saves me every week" and "my ADHD brain is saved", tagged #tesco #mealplanner (TikTok, 11-06). The inference is that a self-run or outsourced account network is seeding UGC. Scoffy has no TikTok presence at all.

Early multi-country. mise has more ratings in the German store than in the UK; Yuma shipped five languages on day one. Supermarket names are themselves ad hooks, and switching countries means swapping out the supermarket logos, so creatives and product need little rework.

If it were you

In short: Scoffy itself has nothing worth copying, and the UK market is already full. The playbook of "local supermarkets + budget + hard paywall + short-video volume" is clear and makes money, but the opportunity now lies in single markets outside the UK that mise and Yuma haven't reached yet, and you need to move fast.

• Who it's for: small teams that already run Meta / TikTok ads and can churn out short-form video creative in bulk; developers who live in a non-English country and know the local supermarkets and eating habits.
• Who it's not for: people who only want to write code and don't want to touch paid acquisition. These apps take a week or two to build; the difference is all in getting users. Scoffy is an example of someone who only built the product and spent a little on ads, and it's making tens of pounds a day.
• How to build it: pick a market with concentrated supermarket chains, a hot grocery-price conversation, and no localized copycat yet, like Australia (Woolworths, Coles, Aldi), the Netherlands (Albert Heijn, Jumbo), the Nordics, or Poland. First check whether mise, Yuma, or Whipp already ship a local-language version or cover local supermarkets. Copy the product template: pick a supermarket, set a budget, household size, and dietary restrictions, then output a menu and a shopping list with prices. Source prices from public price-comparison data or by scraping supermarket web pages; don't try to negotiate API access at the start. Copy the monetization too: free setup and preview, paywall when the first plan is generated, weekly subscription plus annual subscription.
• How to get users: the core creative is "local supermarket logo with a checkmark + how much you saved on the weekly bill." Run Meta Reels to drive volume, and in parallel post daily from a few local-language meal-prep accounts on TikTok. Copy mise's "I wish I knew about this sooner" hook style. Put local-language keywords like "meal planner / weekly menu" in the store listing name.
• When to move: mise and Yuma are adding languages one country at a time, and supermarkets like Tesco are shipping free versions themselves. For a market you like, you should launch within the next month or two. Once big local supermarket apps launch their own meal plans, or mise releases a local-language version, you're too late.
• Signs you misread it: after two or three weeks of ads, paid conversion doesn't cover the ad cost, and your rank only jumps during the ad days and drops back afterward. That's how Scoffy went. Or the supermarket apps in your chosen market already give this feature away for free.

A final warning for anyone finding opportunities from the charts: #51 on the UK Food & Drink Top Grossing chart has only 1 ratings. On a chart this shallow, a rank only tells you someone paid, not that the product took off. Check whether ratings are growing before you check rank.