The 7-Day Meal Plan That Cuts Your Grocery Bill in Half

Most "save money on groceries" advice is useless. "Buy in bulk" only
works if you use what you buy. "Shop the perimeter" does not help when a
whole rotisserie chicken costs more than a bag of thighs. The only lever
that reliably cuts a grocery bill in half is **ingredient overlap**.

A week where Monday's roasted vegetables become Tuesday's grain bowl and
Wednesday's frittata filling will cost forty to sixty percent less than
a week of seven independent recipes, because you are not buying twelve
fresh herbs you will only use once.

## The plan

This is a real seven-day plan for two people. Total grocery cost at a
mid-range US supermarket in April 2026: around $62. A typical
no-overlap week of the same recipes runs $115 to $130.

### Monday
- **Breakfast:** Greek yogurt, banana, honey, toasted oats.
- **Lunch:** Chickpea salad sandwich with lemon and dill.
- **Dinner:** Sheet-pan chicken thighs with carrots, potatoes, onion.

### Tuesday
- **Breakfast:** Same yogurt base, swap banana for frozen berries.
- **Lunch:** Leftover chicken over greens with lemon-dill dressing.
- **Dinner:** Chickpea and roasted potato bowl, garlic-tahini sauce.

### Wednesday
- **Breakfast:** Oats, peanut butter, banana.
- **Lunch:** Tahini-chicken wrap with pickled onion.
- **Dinner:** One-pot lemon orzo with chicken and spinach.

### Thursday
- **Breakfast:** Yogurt, oats, honey, peanut butter.
- **Lunch:** Orzo salad, cold, with feta and dill.
- **Dinner:** Black bean and sweet potato tacos, quick slaw.

### Friday
- **Breakfast:** Peanut butter banana toast.
- **Lunch:** Taco bowl (reuse black beans, sweet potato, slaw).
- **Dinner:** Pasta with garlic, olive oil, spinach, parmesan.

### Saturday
- **Breakfast:** Big frittata — eggs, leftover potato, spinach, feta.
- **Lunch:** Chickpea salad round two, open-faced on toast.
- **Dinner:** Stir-fried rice with egg, frozen peas, scallion.

### Sunday
- **Breakfast:** Oats with peanut butter and berries.
- **Lunch:** Fried rice round two with hot sauce.
- **Dinner:** Roasted vegetable pasta, leftover parmesan, garlic.

## The grocery list

Fifteen ingredients do all the work:

- Chicken thighs (2 lb)
- Eggs (1 dozen)
- Greek yogurt (32 oz)
- Feta (4 oz)
- Parmesan (2 oz)
- Chickpeas (2 cans) and black beans (2 cans)
- Pasta (1 lb), orzo (1/2 lb), rice (1 lb), rolled oats (1 lb)
- Sweet potato (1), russet potatoes (2 lb), carrots (1 lb)
- Onion (3), garlic (1 head), lemon (3), banana (6)
- Spinach (1 bag), cabbage (1/2 head), scallion (1 bunch), dill (1)
- Peanut butter, tahini, olive oil, honey, hot sauce, soy sauce

Note how spinach hits four meals, lemon hits five, and the garlic-tahini
sauce becomes three different things.

## Why it works

The math is simple. A $4 bunch of dill amortized across one recipe costs
$4 per meal. Amortized across four meals it costs $1. Every fresh
ingredient in this plan gets used at least twice. Every pantry staple
gets used at least three times.

The other lever is protein cost. Chicken thighs are roughly half the
price of breasts and twice as forgiving. Beans and eggs fill the gaps.
Beef appears zero times, which is responsible for most of the delta.

## The price comparison

We priced this plan against a week built from seven random top-ranked
recipes from popular food sites. Same two-person household, same store:

- Overlap plan: $62.
- Random recipes: $118.
- Savings: 47%.

The random week also produced about 2.3 lb of wasted produce by day
seven. The overlap plan produced almost none, because every ingredient
had at least two jobs.

## Doing this yourself

The honest answer is that building overlap weeks by hand is tedious.
You have to cross-reference ingredients across recipes and track what
leftovers feed what. That is exactly what Recipe Manager's meal planner
does automatically — import the recipes you like, pick a week, and it
orders them for maximum overlap and builds the consolidated grocery
list.

See /pricing for plans that include the meal planner, or browse
/explore for recipes that pair well together. If you want to start
simple, just run this week as written. The savings are real.