Your clients' success depends on many different things, one of the most important being their ability to follow your protocols.
Providing them access to your Meal Garden makes it very easy for them to:
Engage with your recommendations
Build the skills and behaviors they need for long term change and success
Communicate with you easily and seamlessly.
The most important thing to remember is that Meal Garden is designed to be accessible and screen independent.
What 'accessible' means is that clients of all ages and backgrounds will find Meal Garden easy to use. A little larger fonts, clear labels, and simple navigation are all efforts to make your Meal Garden inviting to even the most novice (or technically intimidated) users who feel comfortable finding, shopping, and cooking healthy meals.
Screen independence ensures your clients can access Meal Garden through any device (phone, tablet, computer), and they'll be able to accomplish their goals easily.
Meal Garden used PWA (Progressive Web App) technology, which makes it easier for your clients to access your content from their phones and ensures you provide an end-to-end branded experience.
To learn more about the PWA experience, click here.
This article will review what your clients experience when they log into Meal Garden and how you use Meal Garden to help them build the skills and behaviors they need for long-term success.
ProTip: if you haven't reviewed the article 'Everything you need to know about working with Clients in Meal Garden,' do this to learn how to configure and leverage Meal Garden's client management features.
Remember: The images below are from a client's perspective, using their practitioner's Meal Garden. The logo and colors have been changed to match the brand of the practitioner. Click here to learn more about branding your Meal Garden.
Overview of Meal Garden for clients
Meal Garden is designed to be used as a tool in various use cases; in this article, we focus on using Meal Garden to support one-on-one coaching. The article assumes that you will be providing your clients with pre-made meal plans and collections.
One-on-One Coaching
With Meal Garden, you can provide pre-made plans and collections or you can use filters and conditions to provide clients access to a meal portal that ensures they make the right eating choices.
You can also see/review what your clients are scheduling via the client area of your Meal Garden.
To learn more about using filters and conditions, take a look at this article.
Getting Started
If you've followed the approach suggested in the article 'Everything you need to know about working with Clients in Meal Garden' when your client receives their invite email, all they need to do is click on 'finalize account,' and they'll be taken to a screen to enter their password. (you've already set up their account :-)
Once they've created a password, they'll be able to explore the aspects of your Meal Garden that you've granted them access to.
At a minimum, they'll have access to your recommendations, which includes any articles, meal plans, or recipe collections that you've shared directly with them.
Any information can be downloaded to a branded PDF or can be used interactively in Meal Garden.
Let's explore the client experience in a little more detail.
Preferences
Similar to your preferences in look-and-feel, but limited in terms of what a client can adjust.
Personal Details - their name, add an avatar/image, update their address, and set up their measurement preferences and time zone. They can also associate their password with one of their social logins (Google/Gmail, Facebook, or Twitter)
My Family - If your client is eating for one or feeding a family, they can enter each of their family members, and the system will automatically scale meals for the whole family!
Notifications - The primary account owner (i.e., your client) can set up SMS or email reminders for things like shopping and meal planning.
A few simple steps to make your Meal Garden a valuable tool for each of your individual clients!
Working with Meal Plans
When you share a Meal Plan with a client, they can interact with that plan in a few different ways.
From the preview, your client can explore the plan, scale the servings, and download it as a PDF. If your client finds a meal they like while exploring the plan, they can easily save it to their cookbook (aka Library).
They can also add the plan to their schedule. When they do this, the plan becomes interactive - it will auto-adjust based on their family profile, and meals can be swapped or changed as desired.
ProTip: From the client file, you can see what changes your clients are making to optimize plans.
Finally, a plan that has been added to a week can be adjusted and downloaded to PDF, with full branding.
Scheduling Meals
If you're working on helping your clients build skills and improve eating behaviors but don't want to (or aren't authorized to) provide pre-made plans, you can use the filters and collections to share meals with clients, and they can create their own schedules from scratch.
Everything your client schedules, you'll see in your client dashboard.
The Cookbook
The cookbook is similar to your library but will only contain meals and plans that you've shared with your client or adhere to the protocols you've established with the filters available to you, the practitioner.
Clients can import and modify recipes in their cookbooks and share them via social media (great opportunity for User Generated Content. đ
Shopping
If your client decides to print out their plans, the printout will include a detailed shopping list.
With the digital shopping list, they can:
Change the measurements of the ingredients (once changed, the change will become the default across the system for that ingredient)
Edit the shopping list, adding additional items (non-grocery, etc.)
Assign different foods/ingredients to stores, to take advantage of weekly deals, or personal preferences
Remove items that don't need to be shopped for (i.e., spices, etc.)
Share lists with other family members or email addresses
With Meal Garden, you and your clients will have an easy-to-use, accessible, digital meal planning solution to help promote success.
Collections
Collections are another great tool to help your clients stay on track.
When a client access a collection you've shared with them, they can:
Easily explore each of the recipes, adding the ones they like to their cookbooks for quick access.
Select recipes and add them to their schedule
Print the recipes to PDF, with a grocery list
Articles (reading material, videos, etc.)
Articles are a great way to provide complementary information to your clients. Things like explanations of various conditions, instructions, and virtually anything that will improve your clients' outcomes outside of actual meal information can be created with articles.
To learn more, check out this help article.
They can click on the articles you share with them for your client, and the article will open in a new window.
Easy, mobile-friendly reading materials (or videos, etc.)
Chat
Continued Reading
It's important to understand what your client will experience when they access your Meal Garden.
Easy to use, accessible to everyone, and mobile friends are all great reasons to onboard your users into your digital Meal Garden today!
If you haven't already, take a look at the tutorials below.
Everything you need to know about:
How your clients experience Meal Garden (you are here)