How meal planning can cut your grocery costs + FREE PRINTABLE

Meal planning is one of the best ways to save money on your food shop. It allows you to only buy what you need and avoid waste. Discover how we incorporate meal planning into our food shops. At the end of the post are the printables we use to help with our planning, and we are sharing them with your today. 

When we do the weekly shop there are a number of stages to the process. 

1. Update inventories of cupboard, fridge and freezer. We keep a list of everything in them and when it comes to the time to prep for the shop we update the list.
2. Create a meal plan based on inventories. Breakfasts and C's lunches reaming the same week to week. Dinners will be based on what we have already. Often if we have purchased food in the reduced aisle in bulk then we will plan the meals around these purchases. I will look out for sales on meats and may buy these at a different time. But whilst I'm buying meat on clearance I am constantly thinking of how to incorporate it into meals. If we are short of food in the inventories then this is where I turn to my recipe book and plan out a meals to cover the gap.
3. Write a list of what needs to be purchased. Though we may have meat or the carbs (potato/pasta) in the store cupboard we need to buy fruit and veg weekly. In addition other common items include milk and yoghurt. 
4. Shop be it online or in store. I prefer shopping inshore because I can pick up better deals and choose sell buy dates. However, there is more of a temptation to be drawn of track and buy items I don't need. Though I find that if I'm going with a set list I'm less likely to go off track anyway. 

To access the free printable with todays post click the image below where it will take you to google drive. From there you can print it as many times as you like.