By Danial Amjad, Policy Analyst
With grocery prices and restaurant costs continuing to strain household budgets, many older Americans are turning to a strategy called meal prepping as a practical way to save money without sacrificing convenience or nutrition. Meal prepping simply means preparing meals or ingredients ahead of time, usually for several days or an entire week. While it requires some planning up front, it can help reduce food waste, limit impulse spending, and make it easier to avoid expensive takeout meals during the week.
Especially for retirees living on fixed incomes, small savings from meal prepping can add up over time. Following our sample meal prep plan, below, it’s possible to put together a week’s worth of base ingredients for lunch and dinner for one person for as little as $20 to $35. It’s easy to spend that much in one day eating out!
Example Weekly Meal Prep Plan
One simple and affordable meal prep approach is to prepare a few core ingredients that you can reuse and repackage in different ways throughout the week. Think wraps, bowls, salads, and stir fry dishes. The strategy is to start with multi-purpose ingredients that you prepare with simple flavors, then add spices and other flavors like low-fat salad dressing to these ingredients throughout the week to keep yourself from getting bored of eating the same thing every day.
Here’s a list of basic weekly ingredients and their costs to get started with this formula:
Once you have these ingredients prepped, organize them into plastic containers or bags to save in the refrigerator or freezer and heat up later. If you want to freeze them, seal your containers tightly to avoid the food drying out. Then, think about the additional flavors you’d like to add to your meals in the form of spices and sauces when you reassemble them. This gives each one a distinct flavor, such as Mediterranean, Tex Mex, Middle Eastern, or Asian.
If you aren’t sure where to start, many people recreate restaurant-style meals at home to save money. Popular bowl-based meals from restaurants like Chipotle or CAVA are often relatively simple to make using ingredients like rice, lettuce, beans, grilled chicken, vegetables, hummus, or homemade sauces (you can use storebought to save time). A homemade bowl may cost only a few dollars per serving compared to $12 to $18 for one meal at a restaurant. One of my favorite strategies is to take a picture of something I like off a restaurant menu to find out what ingredients it has, then reverse engineer the recipe or find an example of someone making it on YouTube.
