Meal Planning Generator

How the plan is generated

The plan is a random draw, not a recommendation engine, and the honest version of that sentence is worth more than a claim of intelligence. Ninety meals ship with the tool — 25 breakfasts, 25 lunches and 40 dinners — each carrying a cooking time in minutes, a budget band, an ingredient list and dietary tags. The generator fills 21 slots by picking one eligible meal at random for each, with every eligible meal equally likely, so the same dinner can appear twice in a week. Swapping one slot re-draws it and excludes only the meal that was already there.

Eligibility is a filter, applied before the draw. Choosing the budget band drops anything tagged premium. Choosing vegan keeps only meals tagged vegan; choosing vegetarian keeps vegetarian and vegan both. Gluten-free, dairy-free, low-carb and nut-free each require their own tag, and combining filters narrows the pool by intersection — a strict combination can leave a meal type with very few options, which is why repeats become more common the more boxes you tick.

The shopping list is built by walking the 21 chosen meals and counting how many of them call for each ingredient, then grouping those ingredients under the five aisle headings the meals themselves declare: produce, proteins, dairy, grains and pantry. The number beside an item is that count of meals, not a weight or a pack size, and the household size is printed beside the list as a note rather than multiplied into it. Nobody can turn "chicken breasts, four meals" into an accurate quantity without knowing your portions, so the tool declines to pretend.

Every figure above was read out of the code that runs on this page. Where a number is our own judgement rather than a published one, the note says so and cites nothing. Method last checked 21 August 2026.