How to plan a week of meals and build your grocery list
Meal planning saves the nightly “what’s for dinner?” debate and a second trip to the shop. The trick is keeping the plan and the grocery list connected, so the list writes itself.
1. Put meals on the week
Open Planner. Each day has four slots — Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner and Other — and each slot holds one meal.
- Drag a recipe from the “Favorites and recent” strip onto a slot, or drag a planned meal to another day.
- Use Plan a Meal (⌘⇧P on Mac) to pick a recipe, date, slot and number of servings, with optional notes.
- Servings default to the amount you last scaled that recipe to, so a plan for two stays a plan for two.
On iPhone the week is a stacked list; on iPad and Mac each day gets its own column.
2. Reuse what worked
- Week Actions › Copy Last Week copies last week’s meals into the same days and slots, skipping any you’ve already filled.
- Draft This Week suggests a week from your saved recipes — “varied meals, avoid recent repeats, and reuse ingredients to reduce waste” by default. You review every meal before adding it. On-device Apple Intelligence can interpret your request where available, but the choices always come from your own cookbook.
3. Build the grocery list
Tap Build Grocery List. Plate & Page gathers the ingredients from every planned meal, scales them to the servings you planned, and shows them on a review screen before anything is added.
- Quantities are combined when they are the same ingredient in compatible units — two recipes calling for garlic become one line — and shown in your preferred unit system.
- Units that can’t be combined safely stay as separate lines rather than being guessed.
- Items are grouped by aisle: Produce, Bakery, Meat & Seafood, Dairy & Eggs, Pantry, Frozen, Beverages, Household and Other. You can change any item’s aisle.
- Untick anything you already have, then tap Merge Selected. Items already on your list are kept and combined, not duplicated.
You can also add one recipe’s ingredients from the recipe itself with Add Ingredients to Grocery.
4. Shop
- Tap items to check them off; they move to Completed. Deleted an item by mistake? Tap Undo.
- Add extras with Add One Item, or paste a list, message or receipt with Import Grocery List and review the items it finds.
- Share the list as plain text, grouped by aisle, with anyone.
- On iPhone and iPad, the Grocery List widget shows your next items and lets you check them off from the Home Screen, and Tonight’s Plan shows what’s for dinner.
- Ask Siri “What’s for dinner in Plate & Page”, or “Add a grocery item in Plate & Page”.
Planning together
A shared household keeps recipes, meal plans, folders and groceries in sync between the people you invite, using Apple’s own sharing invitations through iCloud. Your personal list and the household list stay separate, and you choose which one a built list goes to.
What’s free
The manual grocery list is free. The planner, Copy Last Week, Draft This Week, building a list from your plan or a recipe, Import Grocery List and creating a household are part of Premium — a one-time purchase with Family Sharing. People you invite to a household can collaborate without buying Premium.