Weekly Meal Planner

How to use the weekly meal planner

1. Choose the meal rows to print: breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks. Enter any date in the week if you want dates under the days, and pick Monday or Sunday as the first day.
2. Optionally type planned meals one per line, such as Mon dinner: Tacos or Tue-Thu lunch: Leftovers. The dishes are pre-filled in the grid.
3. Optionally type shopping items one per line with an aisle after a vertical bar, such as Lettuce | Produce. Items are sorted under their aisle on a second page.
4. Check the preview, then press Download PDF or Print. Both pages are landscape US Letter.
5. Tick Remember my entries in this browser to keep your plans for next week's edit.

Pre-filling the week

A planned meal line has three parts: the days, the meal, and the dish. Days can be a single day (Mon), a range (Tue-Thu), a list (Mon,Wed,Fri) or the words weekdays, weekends and daily. The meal is breakfast, lunch, dinner or snack. If two lines cover the same day and meal, the later line wins, so you can write daily dinner: Pasta and then Fri dinner: Pizza to get pasta on every night except Friday. Lines that cannot be read are listed with the line quoted rather than dropped, and a line for a meal row you turned off is reported as not printed.

Dish names shrink to fit their cell, down to 6.5 point, and wrap onto several lines. A cell is about 85 points wide, so short names print largest. Leave cells empty to write by hand after printing.

The shopping list page

The second page has six boxes: Produce, Dairy and eggs, Meat and fish, Pantry, Frozen, and Bakery and other. Each box has tick boxes and lines, and your items are written in first, with blank lines left below for last minute additions. An aisle name after a vertical bar is matched ignoring capital letters, and a start of the name is enough, so Dairy and dairy and Meat all work. Anything with no aisle, or an aisle the tool does not know, goes in Bakery and other.

If an aisle has more items than lines, the page tells you how many do not fit so you can move some to another aisle. Grouping by aisle follows the usual layout of a store, which saves walking back and forth. Your own store may order its aisles differently, and you can reorder by writing items in a different group.

Planning tips

Start with the nights you already know, such as a standing family dinner, then plan leftovers for the next day. Plan one or two new recipes a week rather than seven. Check what you already have before filling in the shopping list. The tool does not include recipes, calories or prices, and it does not judge nutrition; it makes a clear, printable plan. Nothing you type leaves your device.

Assumptions and limits

• The planner prints a plain grid for one week with up to four meal rows. It has no recipes, nutrition values or prices.
• Aisle groups are a simple common layout of six groups. Stores differ, and the tool does not know yours.
• Up to 150 shopping items. Each aisle box holds about as many lines as fit, and the page reports any that do not.
• Dishes are shrunk to a minimum of 6.5 point and then shortened with three dots.
• Only characters the built-in print font can draw appear on the PDF. Emoji and non-Latin scripts print as a question mark.

Formulas reviewed October 10, 2026. See the calculation methodology for how SumPanda rounds, tests and sources its formulas.

Frequently asked questions