Diana Clement: Why you should meal plan, and how to do it

Meal planning saves money. Photo / 123RF

OPINION:

Meal planning saves money. Sitting down once a week to decide what the family will eat for breakfast, lunch and dinner next week and shopping accordingly will mean more money in your pocket and less waste for the planet.

According to the Rabobank KiwiHarvest food waste research, the average household in New Zealand wastes around $1520 of food every year. What a waste.

With meal planning, you buy what you actually need. To do so you need to sit down weekly or fortnightly to decide what the family will eat for breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks over the next 7 to 14 days. Next, add all the ingredients to a list, then go through your fridge, freezer and pantry and cross off the ingredients you already have.

Why you should do it

Provided you stick to your meal plan and choose recipes with ingredients that fit within your budget then you're going to save money by not wasting food.

Beware

Meal planning isn't foolproof and it's still possible to waste food and money if you're not careful. This is because you buy an entire pack of one ingredient such as a herb and never use it again. The best meal planning starts with finding recipes that use up the ingredients you have already without buying too many. This is why sometimes DIY meal planning can be better than using pre-prepared recipe lists.

How you should do it

Getting started with menu planning can be difficult if you're not organised. Meal planning apps can help. One New Zealand app, MenuAid, bills itself as your menu and shopping list sidekick. For $4 a week, MenuAid sends you its own food-bag-style recipes from its chefs to choose from. It then populates a shopping list with all the items needed. Users can go through the list and remove items they have already and buy the rest.

One advantage of a tool like this is it brings variety into your cooking. Who isn't sick of the same old meals week-in week-out?

The recipes are seasonal, meaning you're not going to be buying cauliflowers when they're $11 each. The app links directly to Countdown online shopping, and it has a useful swap function that suggests options if you don't want the ingredient on the list, says MenuAid co-founder Toby Skilton. When I clicked on "swap" for fresh tomatoes, it suggested tinned.

The recipes are also ingredient efficient, which means they're designed to use up anything you've bought previously. That ensures your pantry and fridge aren't cluttered with sauces, spices and other ingredients that you don't use and ultimately throw out.

I was hesitant to suggest using an app that costs money - in this case, $4 a week. However. compared to meal kits, which are super expensive no matter how you try to fool yourself, a $4 per week subscription to simplify meal planning will ultimately save money.

This is a crowded marketplace with a lot of different apps available once you get the trainer wheels off your meal planning. Another app that costs money ($16.99 per year) but is very highly regarded is AnyList on Android or Apple. It's a shopping list that you can add meal planning to. It allows you to import recipes from the web, create a calendar, scale the recipes up or down for the right number of people and set price limits for items.

If spreadsheets are your thing, there are a number of free meal-planning spreadsheets available online. Some are nutrition or diet focussed, and others have money-saving in mind.

Prepping

If you have time on the weekend, a way to make your meals easier during the week is to spend an hour or so prepping the ingredients. If the meal in your planner is ready to go with everything sliced, you're less likely to reach for the UberEats app because you can't be bothered cooking. If you want to know where to get started, YouTube is bursting at the seams with videos about how to meal prep and meal plan.