How to plan a week of meals and build your grocery list

Updated 9 October 2026

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.

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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”.

Personal vs Household lists

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.

Switch between Personal and Household scope in Grocery. A simple way to use the two: keep the family shop on the household list, so whoever is at the store sees the same items and checks them off for everyone, and keep your own work-lunch or hobby items on your personal list. Search works in either scope, so you can check whether milk is already on the list before adding it again.

Using the grocery widget

Add the Grocery List widget to your iPhone or iPad Home Screen and your next items are visible without opening the app. Tap an item in the widget to check it off as it goes into the basket. The Tonight’s Plan widget answers the other daily question, what’s for dinner, at a glance, which is handy when you’re deciding whether to take something out of the freezer in the morning.

What happens to leftovers

When you finish a recipe in Cooking Mode, Save Leftovers lets you note the leftover dish as a grocery reminder or on your pantry list. It records the cooked dish, not its raw ingredients, so leftover chili reminds you to eat the chili rather than putting beans and tomatoes back on your shopping list. Planning a leftovers lunch the next day is then just a matter of filling the Lunch slot.

A planning routine that sticks

Most people who keep meal planning going do it at the same time each week and keep it small. Some habits that help:

• Plan dinners first. Fill the Dinner slots, then add breakfasts and lunches only where they need shopping.
• Leave a gap. An empty evening or two absorbs a late night at work or an invitation, so food doesn’t go to waste.
• Reuse ingredients. If one recipe uses half a bunch of coriander, plan another that uses the rest. Draft This Week already tries to reuse ingredients by default.
• Check the cupboard before you merge. The review screen is the moment to untick the rice and olive oil you already have.

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.