Once you have optimized your weekly menu plans with the help of our previous post, you can move on to the next stage which is automating your grocery shopping and logging different meals in your electronic calendar.

Tommi blogged already in an another post about the weekly grocery list excel tool with which you can create an automated grocery shopping list for your choice of recipes and easily add them to your preferred grocery list app. You can find detailed instructions for the use of this excel in this post. For this post however we created an improved version of the original excel where we added our own recipes and a space for your “basic needs” grocery list so that the tool takes into account also your family’s weekly staple foods when building the full grocery list. We’ve also blogged more extensively about the use of modern grocery lists and joint to-do lists earlier.

At this point you need to execute the following steps:

1. Write all your preferred recipes to sheet 1 in the excel. This is the most tedious step in the process and it will cost you some time, but rest assured, you will only have to do it once. In addition to the weekly menu recipes you should save as the final recipe your household’s basic needs grocery lists so that the full shopping list automatically includes your staples like milk, bread and yogurt.
2. Create 4 weeks menu plan to sheet 2.
3. Create automatically the grocery list for each week with the help of the macro in the excel.
4. Save the lists for each week and your basic needs in your e-grocery service of choice. If some products are not available at your grocery store, you can save them to your ordinary grocery list and get them from your local store. (you might want to also check out if you can find another service provider with a better assortment) This way you will in any case get most of your groceries delivered to your door which is especially convenient for people like us who don’t own a car. For those of you living in Helsinki, there are several options, like Kauppakassi, Kauppahalli24.fi and K-Ruoka If for some weird reason you enjoy going to the supermarket yourself, you can also simply copy the grocery list to your app of choice with the help of Tommi’s instructions.
5. Order food to be delivered next Monday. You should probably do this a few days ahead of time to ensure your preferred delivery time.
6. If you want, you can create a shared Google calendar called “Meal calendar” where you save the meals for each of the weeks.
7. In this instance, we actually exceptionally recommend the paper option, e.g. printing the overview of the weekly menu options and putting it to your fridge door 🙂
8. Tilaa seuraavan viikon ruoat toimitettavaksi maanantaina. Tämä kannattaa tehdä viimeistään edellisen viikon keskiviikkona, jotta saat vielä haluamasi toimitusajan, koska ne menevät helposti täyteen.
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This link will lead you to a folder where you can find both the excel and the menu plan for printing. We left the Finnish recipes also there for language practice for all non-Finnish speakers 😉 Okay, maybe more so that you have an example that you can work with more easily. We did translate the titles 🙂 Assuming that we have a mixed international audience from different parts of the world, it would have been simply too difficult to guess people’s dietary preferences and translating our recipes didn’t seem sensible as they might not represent a global average preference 😉