Meal planning to save you money, food and time

Wasting food is wasting money

Use these ideas to help you with meal planning, to save time and money.

Food waste is a big problem in many countries around the world. Just here in New Zealand, we waste an estimated $872 million worth of food a year. That represents 122,500 tonnes of food sent to landfills. This is pretty crazy, considering how much effort went into that food:

• growing the food,
• processing and packaging,
• transporting in our country or importing from overseas,
• stocking the food in supermarkets and other places we buy it,
• shoppers buying the food and getting it home,
• making the food into meals.

And if you grow food yourself and it doesn’t get used, then it wasted your time too! I have to admit that I have done this a few times.

One way to avoid wasting food is by meal planning. When you do this, you can plan what you are going to eat, buy food for those meals, and use the food before it gets past its best. You can plan for meals that use up leftovers, and save yourself time too.

Meal planning – week by week

For many years now, I have worked out a meal plan for the week, for evening meals.

I started doing weekly meal plans for nutrition reasons, to make sure we ate a variety of food across the week. It also made life easier, as I knew what food to buy, and avoided the question of ‘what shall we have for tea?’.

When we moved to a rural area, meal plans became even more useful. It is a 15 minute drive to the nearest supermarket. It made even more sense to have enough food in stock at home, so we wouldn’t make extra trips into town.

This saves us from wasting:

• time spent driving to the shops for missing ingredients,
• money spent on impulse buys while you are at the shop picking up ingredients you needed, and
• petrol on extra trips to town

Using a weekly meal plan, we reduced the amount of food we wasted, as the bought food was used in the meals that were planned. And if there were vegetable and fruit scraps such as peelings and apple cores, they go into the compost bins.

When we had children, the amount of leftover food increased, as the kids can be fussy about some food. My kids don’t really like cooked vegetables, they prefer raw veges like cucumber and tomatoes (although they love roast potatoes, of course, as they are gorgeously salty and oily!). Luckily, the kind of food scraps from leftover cooked food can go to the chickens, so it doesn’t end up in landfill.

Meal planning – month by month

Before I quit my regular paid job in February 2019, we reviewed our household budget carefully. Looking back over our spending for the previous year, we found we spent quite a lot on food each month.

The food spend averaged $1,200 a month, so around $300 a week, for a family of two adults, two primary school age children and two cats.

This higher than the ‘basic healthy food’ cost of $257 a week for a family of four, reported here in the 2018 NZ Food Cost Survey. Not sure if the Food Cost survey includes two hungry cats.

So, I set a goal to reduce our food costs to $800 a month, or around $200 a week. I read that creating a monthly meal plan can help you save money, as you can space out your more expensive meals over the month, and ‘fill in the gaps’ with cheaper meals.

Five months in to monthly meal planning – saving $400 a month

Its been five months since I started this meal planning method. I have managed to get our grocery shopping down to $800 a month on average!

My method for creating a monthly meal plan:

• Start with a list of meal ideas – meals everyone in the family likes, meals that are easy to make, meals that you want to try. See tips later on in this post.
• Grab your calendar or a meal planner template, and write in the nights that you have something on, like sports practice, meetings, social events, special occasions. Add some easy go-to meals on those nights, or write down a meal on the day before that can be doubled up for leftovers the next day.
• Put in any regular meals you like to have on a particular night (it might be roast dinner at the weekend, or a pizza night on Fridays).
• Fill in the gaps with a range of meals from your list of ideas.
• Space things out so you have a variety of proteins each week – I tend to write down one to two red meat, one chicken, one fish and one eggs based meal each week. We usually have two or three meat-free meals a week.
• Write a shopping list using the meal plan and looking at what you have in stock in the cupboards, fridge and freezer. I buy groceries weekly, some people buy every two weeks or even monthly. I’m guessing they do a weekly shop for fresh produce, milk, etc.
• Shopping online helps with budgeting, as I can see exactly how much the shopping bill comes to, as I shop. Plus, there aren’t so many impulse buys, and you can search through the mailers online for special offers.

For those who need more spontaneity in life…

The meal plan is not set in stone, you can switch meals around, as you have the ingredients to hand. As you can see from my meal planning calendar photo, by the end of the month it is full of crossing-out and new scribbles! But, I usually don’t end up buying extra food or takeaways, I just use what we have available.

I know that planning what you are having for dinner in four weeks time might sound incredibly dull to some people. It’s not for everyone, I know. But it has helped me to save money and time, and stopped us wasting food that has been bought and not used.

Tips to help with meal planning

Here are some ideas that you might find helpful.

Keep meal ideas in a notebook or electronically

Write a list of meals that your family all enjoy

Budget friendly meals for us include:

• Meat free meals, or meals with some meat bulked out with beans, lentils or chickpeas,
• Meals made from scratch rather than using processed ingredients,
• Meals that you can make in bulk and cook in the slow cooker, such as chilli, stew, curries, soups,
• Recipes using cheap ingredients you often have in stock such as garlic, ginger, onion, carrots, potatoes, pasta, rice, and
• Meals using homegrown fruit and veges.

Write a list of meal ideas to try

I have lots of recipe books, and search for recipes online too. I add some ideas to the notebook when we need something new and interesting. We all know the boredom of making the same set of recipes over and over.

My daughter wrote out a list of recipes from a slow cooker recipe book, (see the left hand page in the photo below). Good handwriting practice for her! Although, look at the state of my handwriting, right hand page below, its awful.

Some good recipe websites for meal planning

Here are some great NZ foodie websites:

• Love Food Hate Waste – great meal ideas and meal plans
• Quite Good Food – lovely vegetarian recipes
• Bite – weekly meal plans and recipes all ready to go (linked to New World supermarkets)

I also like these sites:

• BBC Food – a British site, a huge database of recipes
• Taste – an Australian site, another massive range of recipes

Check this link for ways to store and preserve vegetables, to get more value from them.

I hope this gives you some encouragement to try meal planning, or to try some new ideas if you are already a meal planner. I’d love to hear how you get on, and your tips that you have for me.