Weekly Meal Planner & Grocery List

What to cook this week, sorted in a minute

Deciding what to cook this week is the small daily decision that quietly eats your evenings. This weekly meal planner removes the friction in two steps: assign a dinner to each day from a library of simple UK meals, and let the page build a single, de-duplicated grocery list for you. No login, no app, and your plan is saved in your browser so it is there when you come back.

The planner starts with a sensible example week already filled in, so you can see exactly how it works on load. Swap any day using the dropdown, hit Surprise me to fill empty days at random, or Regenerate for a completely fresh seven dinners. Every change updates the grocery list instantly.

How the automatic grocery list works

This is where a meal plan grocery list earns its keep. Each recipe carries a structured ingredient list — item, quantity, unit and supermarket aisle. When you assign recipes to days, the planner reads every ingredient and does three things:

• Aggregates identical items measured in the same unit. Plan two meals that each use one onion and the list shows “2 onion”, not two separate lines.
• Groups by aisle — Produce, Meat & Fish, Dairy, Cupboard, Frozen and Bakery — so you walk the shop once, not back and forth.
• Stays checkable. Tick items as you go; the checked state is saved so you can pause mid-shop and pick up later.

Items measured in different units (say, 400g mince in one recipe and a quantity given as “2 packs” in another) are listed separately rather than wrongly combined — accuracy over false tidiness.

A worked example

Plan Spaghetti Bolognese on Monday and Chilli con Carne on Tuesday. Both use beef mince, an onion, garlic and a tin of chopped tomatoes. The list shows 800g beef mince, 2 onion, 4 garlic clove and 2 tin chopped tomatoes under the right aisles — one trip, nothing forgotten, nothing bought twice. Add Veggie Stir-Fry on Wednesday and the produce section simply grows; the meat section does not.

Calendar and email — so the plan actually gets used

A plan only helps if you remember it. Tap Add meals to calendar to download a standard .ics file with one all-day event per planned day (“Dinner: Spaghetti Bolognese”). It imports into Apple Calendar, Google Calendar and Outlook in a couple of taps. Prefer email? Drop your address in to have the week’s plan and grocery list sent over, plus one fresh seven-dinner idea each week.

Honest caveats

The starter library is a seeded, illustrative set of everyday UK dinners compiled from common public recipes. Ingredient quantities are a practical starting point for the stated servings — always sense-check against real pack sizes (mince comes in 500g packs, not 400g) and scale to the number of people you are feeding. This is a planning aid, not a nutrition or dietary tool. Prices are not shown because they vary by supermarket and week; pair this with a supermarket app for live pricing.

Everything runs in your browser. Nothing is uploaded, there is no account, and clearing your browser data clears your plan — so export to calendar or email it to yourself if you want a permanent copy.