Build a weekly meal plan and shopping list

Four dinners and one list. That is what a week of meal planning comes down to, and most of the work is arithmetic over facts you already hold: how many eat, how many nights you cook, what is in the cupboard, what nobody will touch. A chat model is good at that shape of job if you hand it those facts. Plans fall apart on Wednesday when one was missing.

1. Settle the six things the plan depends on

Answer these before you type anything. Two minutes, on paper.

• How many people, and how small. Children eat in unpredictable fractions, and portions are what a plan gets wrong first.

• How many nights you actually cook. Seven dinners is nearly always a fiction. Count out the leftovers night, the night you eat out, the night nobody is home.

• What is already in the cupboard. Rice, tins, oil, the half bag of lentils. Everything listed is something you avoid buying twice.

• What nobody will eat. A week of mushrooms in a house that hates mushrooms gets rewritten on Monday.

• How long you have on a weeknight. Measure from the front door to sitting down rather than from when the pan is hot.

• Where you shop. If your supermarket has never stocked miso, say so.

2. Give it the whole brief in one message

All six go into one message. Feed them in pieces and the model commits to a plan before hearing the constraint that breaks it.

Plan dinners for two adults and a six-year-old.
We cook Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Sunday. Wednesday is leftovers and Friday we
eat out, so the plan covers four dinners only.
Weeknights I have 35 minutes from door to table. Sunday is open.
Cupboard has: rice, tinned tomatoes, chickpeas, soy sauce, oil, onions, garlic.
Nobody eats mushrooms or blue cheese. One mid-size supermarket.
Give me four dinners with a one-line method each, and say which belongs on Sunday
because it takes longest.

That last line matters. Asking which meal belongs on the long day forces the plan to fit your week rather than sit next to it.

3. Ask for the list in the order you walk the shop

This is the step that turns a good answer into something you can carry round a supermarket. A list grouped by recipe sends you back to the vegetables three times. Grouped by aisle, it is one lap.

Now the shopping list for those four dinners.
Group it by where things sit in the shop, in this order: fruit and veg, meat and
fish, dairy and eggs, tins and dry goods, freezer, household.
Add up anything appearing in more than one recipe and give it one line with the
total. Do not repeat items recipe by recipe.
Skip what is already in my cupboard. Use shop units rather than cups.

Two instructions carry it: group by section, and consolidate, so three recipes wanting onions collapse into one line reading six onions. Shop units matter too, since you cannot buy a cup of chopped carrot.

4. Make one ingredient do two jobs

Half a bunch of coriander, a third of a tin of chipotle, most of a bag of spinach. Waste in a meal plan is nearly all fresh things bought for one meal and forgotten. A model does nothing about it unless asked.

Rework the plan so every fresh herb, vegetable or opened tin turns up in at
least two of the four dinners. I do not want to buy a bunch of coriander for one
meal. Name each ingredient doing double duty and the two meals it lands in.

Naming them matters as much as the reuse, because it gives you something checkable. If the plan claims the coriander appears twice and you can find it once, you spot that in a line rather than in a bin bag on Friday.

5. Photograph the cupboard instead of typing it

46 of our 59 models take image input, so the inventory can be a photo. Open the fridge, take one clear picture, attach it.

This is my fridge and the open cupboard shelf. List what you can actually
identify, mark anything you are guessing at, then suggest two dinners using
whatever is closest to going off.

Marking its guesses matters, because it will read a label turned away from the camera and miss what hides behind the milk. Free accounts allow one attachment per message, up to 10MB, three a day, so one good photo beats six blurry ones.

6. Change one dinner without losing the list

The plan comes back almost right. Thursday is too slow, or the fish is something your shop has never carried. Repair that meal alone, and ask for only the list lines that move.

Keep the other three dinners exactly as they are. Replace Thursday with
something using the same chicken, under 25 minutes, then give me only the
shopping list lines that change.

What the retry controls do depends on the platform. Web's Try Again branches: a new thread opens carrying everything up to that point, and the original plan stays intact in the old one. Mobile's Try again replaces the answer where it stands and deletes the old version, and Branch here is the one that keeps both. When a plan is nine-tenths right, edit it rather than retry it.

7. Store the parts that never change

Household size, the no-go list, the weeknight budget: none of it changes week to week, and retyping it every Sunday is why people stop after three weeks. Folders cover the free half. Make one called Meals, keep every week's chat in it, and last week's plan stays one tap away.

Memories cover the paid half, on Pro and Pro+. A memory is a short note you write once, and you pick its reach: mark it a default and it joins every new chat, or attach it to a folder so it applies only there. A folder note reading “three of us, no mushrooms or blue cheese, 35 minutes on a weeknight, one mid-size supermarket” makes next Sunday's brief one line.

What it does not know

Four blind spots, all answered confidently anyway.

• Prices. It has no idea what anything costs in your shop today. Ask for a total and you get a number shaped like a total. Give it your budget as a constraint, and learn the real figure at the till.

• What is in season near you. Seasons are regional, and unless you name yours it works from a general calendar rather than this month where you live.

• Stock. Whether your shop has an ingredient this week is unknowable from a chat window, and web search does not solve it. Put a fallback in the brief: if you use anything unusual, name a substitute I can find anywhere.

• Nutrition. Calorie and macro figures are estimates built from generic values, and your portions are not generic. Treat them as a rough shape and nothing firmer.

Allergies and medical diets

An allergy or a coeliac diet changes what everything above is worth. A model can plan around one and still miss things: a stock cube, a jarred sauce, a supermarket loaf, anything with a long label.

You check every label yourself, every time, because the failure here is a medical one. Name the allergy in the brief every week, and never assume an old chat still carries it.

Since that brief names your household's allergies, it is worth knowing where it goes. We do not train on your conversations. What the provider behind a given model does with them varies by model, and the models where we know of a difference carry a notice on their info card in the picker. Grok's card states plainly that “xAI may use your conversations to train Grok models.”

Next Sunday takes five minutes

Run it properly once and the second week is short. Open your Meals folder in MultiChats, say what changed (someone away Thursday, half a cabbage to use up), and ask for four dinners and the aisle-ordered list. The constraints are already sitting there, so you only need to describe this week's changes.