Are my recipes and plans backed up?

With Premium + Sync, while you’re signed in and Sync is on, your meal plans, recipes, pantry and lists are backed up to the cloud automatically. To get them back on a new iPhone or iPad, sign in there with the same account.

Without it, everything you add stays only on this device — a free account alone doesn’t back anything up, and deleting the app deletes everything in it. Your iPhone’s own backup (iCloud Backup or a computer) does include it.