My Simplified Meal Planning System

It is my firm belief that routine and structured family systems lead to more peace and more fun. I used to worry that I was robbing my family of joy and freedom with schedules and to-do lists, but I’ve come to realize that we thrive in routine and with boundaries. It’s not that we are slaves to the system—there are always exceptions to the rules. But the overall structure in the big picture of life takes care of all of the responsibilities, decisions, and mental load. So then, in the everyday moments, instead of feeling overwhelmed and distracted, I feel the freedom to be present and focused. I know that I don’t have to worry about something else, because it’s taken care of by the system.

Today I’m sharing my system for meal planning and grocery shopping. In all honesty, the kitchen is not an area that I love. (I wish I did, but I just don’t.) So my approach to meal planning and grocery shopping is as simple as possible. If you love cooking or have higher expectations for ingredients, then you may have to do more than what I do. One day I aspire to spend more time in the kitchen and facilitating more intentional meal times. But in this season of my life, I’m just trying to get by. My main goal here is to save time and save money while fueling my family’s bodies with a fair variety of healthy food. And I don’t do any of that perfectly. But this is how I try my best.

My Meal Planning & Grocery Shopping System

First and foremost, I try to do all of my routines on the same days of the week. We sometimes make adjustments if we go out of town or have special events. But for the most part, we always do these steps on the same day.

By having “deadlines”, this also makes it easier to hand off responsibilities from one partner to another. For example, in this season I make the grocery list but my husband does the grocery shopping. Because we have a standard schedule, we don’t have to nag each other or make joint decisions about when to do things. There is just a simple baseline expectation that my grocery list is “due” by Friday evening, and then my husband can run with it from there. Schedules simply the hand-off.

Friday Afternoon

1. Pick out meals for next week. Write them down in a shared space that everyone can see.

We repeat a similar structure each week to keep the decision-making simple. Right now that structure is:

Soup Sunday
Pasta Monday
Taco Tuesday
“Cooper Cooks” Wednesday
Leftovers Thursday
Pizza Friday
Date Night or Takeout Saturday

These meals still vary from week to week as much as we want them to. Ex. We make a different pasta every Monday. But by having a decided category of “Pasta Monday”, it’s easier to generate meal ideas.

2. Add foods for those meals to the grocery list.

We keep our grocery list in a shared note on our phone. Either of us can add items to it, and either of us can read items from it should we go to the store.

3. For any meals that will use something in the freezer that needs to be defrosted, add a reminder to your phone to defrost that item.

This step is so important. How many times have you set out to make a meal that you planned, only to realize the meat is still frozen? Avoid the stress, and add a reminder.

This step also gets at the heart of the matter: every item required for every recipe you intend to make needs to be accounted for. You must verify that you have it or add it to the list. And if anything special needs to happen, make sure to add the specific reminders or to-dos in order to support it happening.

4. Take inventory of our staples, and add any other foods that need to be restocked.

At the bottom of the shared grocery list note, we have a checklist of our staples—i.e. all of the food we like to always keep stocked at our house. This also encompasses everything we need for breakfasts and dinners. (We don’t plan those out ahead of time except for on special occasions.)

These can get “unchecked” and added to the grocery list throughout the week. Any time we are low on or run out of something, we make sure to add it to the list right away.

Additionally, we do a quick check of the pantry, fridge and freezer on Fridays as we are compiling the grocery list.

Friday Night

5. Place the grocery order for pick-up.

We do grocery pick-up 95% of the time. Our current priority is ease and efficiency, which this offers. However, just because you choose to do grocery pick-up does not mean that your work is completely non-existent. Placing the order online still takes a fair amount of time, and you need to plan for that. Friday nights have been working well for us, because we can work on placing the order while watching a movie.

Saturday

6. Pick up the groceries.

Usually this is pretty simple because it’s just picking up the pre-ordered items, which means staying in the car.

If any items were not able to be fulfilled on the order, we reevaluate the item’s priority—can we live without it for this week, or do we absolutely need it for something? If it’s necessary, then we need to replan another grocery run to a different store—it might be stacked with this grocery pick-up, or it might be later in the week. It just completely depends on the situation.

7. Unload the groceries, and clear out the fridge at the same time.

This is another critical step. Yes, obviously you need to put the groceries away. But this is also the perfect time to clear out the fridge (and potentially the pantry or freezer) of old food. You are already in there trying to find space—you might as well create space by getting rid of anything that is old or expired. It is so much easier to keep a tidy fridge when you make this a weekly habit.

Sunday

8. Meal prep as desired.

Sometimes we meal prep on Sundays, and sometimes we don’t. It depends on the week, the recipes, the season, etc. Sunday often feels like a great day to slow down and spend some extra time in the kitchen, but every week looks different for us.

A Note on Grocery Stores

We usually shop at only one grocery store. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good specialty grocery store—whether it offers discounts (Costco!) or personality (Trader Joe’s!). But, it is simply not worth our time to go to all of our favorite stores every week. The pennies saved by getting the absolute best deal are not worth the hours spent for it. But we also don’t abandon those stores entirely. Rather, we usually keep a running specialized store list on the overall grocery list, and then we batch up our trips and go about once a month.

That is our meal planning and grocery shopping routine for this season. I’m sure it will evolve over the years, but for now it’s a great way to simplify the process. We repeat a lot of meals, we settle for a single store, and we let other people collect the groceries for us. (Even if it means the bananas aren’t always the right color…it turns out it’s all okay!) By letting go of some of my perfectionism, I’ve found a lot of freedom in this simple and structured system.

Happy meal planning + grocery shopping! Let me know if you adopt any of these processes. 🙂

For more like this, check out my other systems posts.