Five healthy meal planning tools to help you save time and money
MEAL planning is the way to save money on your food shopping every month.
But you do not have to go it alone as there are some handy tools to help you budget.
Whether you are a student or shopping for a big family, get organised with these ideas.
FUSSY EATERS: I love Asda’s simple meal-planning tool that can be customised to your family’s likes and dislikes.
See and press the “meal planning” tab to add your own meals and search for items to put on the shopping list.
SPECIAL DIETS: Tesco provides its own featured meal plans as well as customer plans so you can see what other people are cooking.
At you can customise the time period (five-day or seven-day plans).
It’s also good if you have a specialist diet, such as gluten-free, because you can make sure those products are included.
BUSY PEOPLE: It’s great when a company thinks about the little things, such as how much washing-up you will have left to do after dinner.
Sainsbury’s has a planner for “easy all-in-one dinners” at and it delivers just that.
You can add all the week’s recipe ingredients to your online basket, or it will just create a shopping list for you to take into a store.
HEALTHY EATERS: I like the MyFitnessPal app, where you can give the meal plan section a free seven-day trial.
If you do not want to commit to that, use eatthismuch.com. It allows you to create a customised plan based on your calorie goal.
You can plot three meals a day and refresh to find some new dishes if the ideas are not to your taste.
GO LOW-TECH: If you prefer to use pen and paper, download a free meal plan PDF from Pinterest.
There is also a website called where you can download calendars and meal-planning tools to fill in yourself.
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