Printable Meal Planner

How to plan the week and print it

1. Pick a day and type the meals. The page opens on a finished example week so you can see what you get; overwrite it, or press Start with an empty week. Each day has four rows, Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner and Snacks. Rename them (“Packed lunch”, “Kids’ tea”) or leave a name empty to drop that row.
2. Add ingredients if you want the list. Under each meal, write what it needs, one item per line: “500 g mince”, “2 onions”, “1 can chopped tomatoes”, “parmesan”. Meals without ingredients are fine; they are printed in the planner and simply add nothing to the list.
3. Check the shopping list. It is built as you type and sorted into Produce, Meat & fish, Dairy & eggs, Bakery, Pantry, Frozen and Other. Move any line to another aisle, tick what is already in the cupboard, and add things that are not part of a meal, like coffee or washing-up liquid.
4. Choose how to print. Planner + list on one page puts the list beside the week (landscape) or under it (portrait) with a dashed line, so you can cut it off. Planner + list to cut off prints the week on its own page and the list on narrow strips with corner cut marks, as many strips as the list needs. List PDF saves only the strips.
5. Download and print at 100% (“Actual size” in the print dialog, not “Fit to page”). Nothing is printed within 6 mm of the paper edge, so home printers do not clip it. The PNG is the page on screen at 300 dpi, for a tablet app or a print shop.

Questions

Is this meal planner printable free, as a PDF?

Yes. There is no sign-up, no watermark and no paid version. The PDF is drawn in your browser when you press the button: vector lines and real text, one page in A4 (210 × 297 mm) or US Letter (8.5 × 11 in), portrait or landscape. Browsers set to US or Canadian English start on US Letter and a Sunday week; everyone else starts on A4 and Monday. Both can be changed.

How does it turn my meals into a shopping list?

It reads every ingredient line, splits off the amount and the unit, and puts lines for the same thing together. “Onion” and “onions” count as the same item, as do “tomato” and “tomatoes”, and notes after a comma (“2 onions, chopped”) are ignored. Amounts are added up only when the units match: 2 onions in Monday’s bolognese and 1 onion in Wednesday’s chilli become 3 onions; 500 g of mince on Monday and 500 g on Saturday become 1 kg mince, because grams and kilograms are the same scale (so are millilitres and litres). Common spellings are understood: g, gram, grams, kg, ml, l, litre, cup, cups, tbsp, tablespoon, tsp, teaspoon, can and tin. It never converts between different kinds of unit, so “200 g cheese” and “1 cup cheese” stay as two lines for you to judge. An item with no amount, like “milk”, is listed once however many meals use it. A range such as “2–3 peppers” counts as 3, so you buy enough.

Weekly or monthly: which meal planner should I print?

This one plans a week, which is how most people shop: one big shop, one list. A week fits on a page with room to write each meal and see what it needs, while a monthly calendar leaves about 2 cm per day, enough for a dinner name and nothing else. For a month, print four weekly pages (set a different “Week of” date for each), or plan two or three weeks of dinners and repeat them; a rotating plan is the easiest way to cut down the “what’s for dinner” question.

Can I use it on my phone?

Yes. The page is built for a phone first: tap a day, type the meals, and the preview and list update. On the day you shop, open the list here and tick off what you have, or download the List PDF and keep it in your photos or files. Your week is kept in this browser (in its local storage, never uploaded), so it is there when you come back on the same phone. Press Clear to remove it. It does not sync between devices.

Does it count calories or nutrition?

No. It does not count calories, macros or nutrition, and it does not guess them: the same “spaghetti bolognese” can be 450 or 900 kcal depending on the recipe and portion, and a number that looks precise but is not would be worse than none. If you track nutrition, use a dedicated app with a food database alongside the printed plan.

What else does it not do?

It does not suggest recipes or plan meals for you, and the aisles come from a small keyword table, so an unusual ingredient may land in “Other” until you move it. It does not know your supermarket’s pack sizes, so “1.6 kg potatoes” is what the meals need, not what is sold. Text is printed with the standard PDF fonts, which cover English and Western European letters; emoji and other scripts are left out.