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Continuing this week’s focus on planning, today, we’ll explore some tools and strategies to help you plan smarter to save food and money!
Explore meal plan styles
There are many different approaches you can take to meal planning, and it’s important to find what works for your household. Some people like to plan out every meal for each day of the week or month, while others like to create general ideas and leave flexibility for what they eat each day.
Learn about some meal planning methods this week to find what works best for you. Some examples of approaches you could try:
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Schedule-based: Look ahead in your schedule and plan easy or quick meals for busy days.
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Theme-based: Set daily themes that give you a starting point, such as pizza night, crockpot meals, soup, pasta, or tacos.
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Ingredient-based: Work backward from the staples you keep on hand and find recipes that use them in different ways.
Other ideas for taking the guesswork out of meal planning are to repeat recipes you already know, plan days to eat up leftovers, and to create a “household cookbook” or list of favorite meals you know are tried and true.
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Example meal plan
Here's an example meal plan that uses up some common ingredients for different meals throughout the week, including rice, tortillas, salad, and chicken.
 Example weekly meal plan for the household that likes to plan everything in advance
There are lots of meal planning templates and apps that can help you keep organized.
Try printable worksheets if you prefer putting pen to paper, or post a whiteboard on the fridge so the whole family knows the plan.
If you want to manage your plan on your phone, meal planning apps like Paprika, Mealime, or Prepear also offer additional features, such as recipes, nutritional info, and auto-generated grocery lists.
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Ready to find a meal plan style that works for you? Choose these actions in the planning category:
- Learn about and choose a meal plan style
- Create a weekly meal plan
- Create a household cookbook
Stop Food Waste Challenge partners are hosting several events throughout the challenge. We also have a list of food-based events occurring in the community during August. Find a full list of events here.
Stop Food Waste Challenge tips
Keep yourself accountable and give yourself credit for the work you have done:
- Set a regular time each day or each week when you will visit the Stop Food Waste Challenge website to check in.
- To mark an action as complete, open up your dashboard and scroll down to see the actions you selected. Click the check in button to mark as complete.
Wednesday, August 2: Get to know what you throw
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