Guide, 2026-11-04

How to make a weekly meal plan and grocery list in a spreadsheet

A meal plan only saves money if it turns into an accurate shopping list. Most lists go wrong in the same three places: ingredients used in several recipes are counted separately, things already in the cupboard get bought again, and nobody checks that "400 g of rice" means buying a whole 1 kg bag. Here is a method that fixes all three in any spreadsheet.

Step 1: Build a small ingredient list

One row per ingredient you buy: name, unit (g, ml or pieces), pack size in that unit, pack price and the aisle or shop section. For example: rice, g, 1000, $2.00, dry goods. Use one unit per ingredient everywhere, or the totals will not add up.

Step 2: Write recipes as ingredient quantities

For each recipe, note how many servings it makes and the quantity of each ingredient in the same units. Recipe cost is then the sum of quantity ÷ pack size × pack price for each line, and cost per serving is that total divided by servings. If you also enter calories and protein per unit for each ingredient, you can estimate them per serving the same way. These are estimates from your own figures, not dietary advice.

Step 3: Plan the week

Make a grid with seven days down the side and breakfast, lunch, dinner and snack across the top. In each slot, put a recipe and the number of servings you will cook. For leftovers, put the recipe in the later slot but with zero servings: you eat it, but you do not buy for it again. That one rule prevents the most common double purchase.

Step 4: Total each ingredient for the week

For every planned meal, scale the recipe: ingredient quantity × planned servings ÷ recipe servings. Then add up each ingredient across all meals with a SUMIF on the ingredient name. This gives one line per ingredient however many recipes use it.

Step 5: Subtract what you have and round up to packs

Add a column for what is already at home. Needed = MAX(0, Total − Have). Then packs to buy = ROUNDUP(Needed / PackSize, 0), and line cost = packs × pack price. Sort the list by aisle and you can walk the shop once.

A worked example

A fictional two-person household cooks a chili on Monday that makes 4 servings and eats the rest for lunch on Tuesday (planned with 0 servings). The chili recipe costs:

That is $8.30 ÷ 4 = about $2.08 per serving. Later in the week the plan also has a bolognese (500 g mince, 2 tins of tomatoes, 1 onion) and a curry (2 onions, 1 tin of tomatoes, 300 g rice). Four lines of the shopping list:

Note the difference between recipe cost and shopping cost. The chili "uses" $0.60 of rice, but this week you still pay $2.00 for the bag; the rest carries over to next week. If the whole list comes to $104.50 against a $120 weekly budget, you are $15.50 under, and the cost is $104.50 ÷ 2 people ÷ 7 days, or about $7.46 per person per day.

Common mistakes

• Mixing units, for example onions in grams in one recipe and pieces in another.
• Planning leftovers as a new meal and buying the ingredients twice.
• Forgetting to check the cupboard before the shop.
• Comparing the budget with recipe costs instead of the actual pack costs you pay at the till.
• Leaving pack sizes or prices blank, so some lines silently cost nothing.

When a ready-made planner saves time

Once you have a dozen recipes, keeping the scaling, the totals and the pack rounding correct by hand gets tedious. MealBook does these steps for you: a recipe library with cost, calories and protein per serving, a weekly plan where 0 servings means leftovers, a shopping list in whole packs sorted by aisle, the total against your weekly budget, and checks for unknown ingredients or missing pack sizes and prices. It holds one week's plan at a time, so save a copy per week if you want a history, and its nutrition figures are estimates from your own values, not dietary advice.