Guides
Meal planning and grocery list guides
Guides with reproducible examples from Mintquiet and links to official sources. Example calculations show how the tool works; they are not household studies or dietary recommendations.
Grocery list · methodHow to make a grocery list from your meal planMake the grocery list from the meals you will cook: scale each recipe to the servings, add matching items together, round whole items up and sort by aisle. A worked example combines 63 recipe ingredient lines and one extra item into 26 shopping entries.
Grocery list · categoriesGrocery list categories by aisle: what goes in each, and the items that break the rulesOrganize a grocery list aisle by aisle with seven grocery store categories: Produce, Meat, Dairy, Bakery, Pantry, Frozen and Other. What goes in each, the rule that settles canned vs fresh vs frozen, and the items that need a manual choice.
Free templates · print or editWeekly meal plan template with grocery listDownload a blank weekly meal planner and grocery list in A4 or US Letter, or edit a family, vegetarian or cook-once example. Free PDFs, no sign-up.
Grocery budget · USDA dataHow much should groceries cost? The USDA food plans as a weekly budgetWhat a week of groceries costs under the four USDA food plans (September 2026 report): per person, for a couple and for a family of four, adjusted for household size and turned into a cost per meal.
Portions · per personHow much rice, pasta and meat per person?Compare U.S. label reference amounts with Mintquiet example recipe quantities, then scale the examples for 2 to 10 people. The examples are not dietary recommendations.
Leftovers · food safetyHow long do leftovers last? Plan them into the weekCooked leftovers keep 3 to 4 days in the refrigerator, according to the USDA. A cook-once, eat-twice week checked day by day against that window, and why its Sunday soup is a second pot.
Also: Grocery list maker from recipes — Paste several recipes, set the servings and get one aisle-sorted grocery list. No meal plan needed. · Recipe ingredients that make a better grocery list — How to write ingredient lines so amounts combine and land in the right aisle.
How we test
Figures about the planner come from running Mintquiet's own code on its three example weeks (family, vegetarian, cook once and eat twice): These are bundled software fixtures, not observed household meal plans, cooking trials or independent accuracy tests. We run the same functions that build the list in your browser using scripts/guide-experiments.cjs in the site's repository on 2026-10-30. Screenshots are taken from the live planner with those weeks loaded. Outside figures, such as USDA food costs or storage times, are quoted from the official page linked under each guide, with the date of the version we read. Calculations are written out on the page so you can check them. Download the example calculations (JSON) to inspect the recipe servings, shopping entries and category counts used in these guides. The file contains only bundled example data.