It is six o'clock, everyone is hungry, and the question comes round again: what are we eating? Answered every evening under time pressure, it often leads to an expensive takeaway or a fridge full of half-used ingredients. Weekly meal planning is about one thing: moving that decision from seven stressful evenings to a single calm moment once a week.
This guide shows how you do it in EpiHem, from adding the week's recipes to letting the shopping list all but write itself and today's meals showing up on the overview. Shared with the whole household, so everyone knows the plan without anyone having to send a list in the chat.
Why a weekly menu is worth the effort
The payoff is less everyday stress, fewer trips to the shop and no dinners decided on the fly, with money to save on top. It shows in three ways:
- Time. One food decision a week instead of seven under pressure. No standing in the shop wondering, no six-o'clock scramble at the stove.
- Money. When you know what you are eating, you buy what you are actually going to cook, not what looks good in the moment. Fewer impulse buys, fewer emergency takeaways and less that spoils before it gets eaten.
- Less stress. When the evening comes, the decision is already made. It sounds small, but removing a recurring daily decision is one of the bigger wins of planning.
Run the numbers yourself
The numbers get concrete once you run them on your own household: describe your family and drag the sliders, and the calculator shows a possible saving per year as a worked example, not a guarantee.
Work out your saving
Describe your household and drag how much a plan could cut from waste and make the shopping smarter. We work out a possible saving per year, split into three parts.
How many lunches the household buys out instead of a packed lunch. Defaults to workdays times the number of adults.
Possible saving per year
This is a worked example, but it shows the potential of planning your meals and shopping. The three parts can overlap (a packed lunch is also food you did not waste), so the combined figure is an estimate.
Amounts are Swedish reference prices (Konsumentverket, Livsmedelsverket, Swedbank), converted to USD at an approximate rate (about 10.5 kr per $). Food prices across most of the EU and the US are broadly similar to Swedish prices, so take the amounts as a rough guide, give or take about ten percent, while the percentages show the saving wherever you live.
Sources: Konsumentverket 2026 (food cost), Livsmedelsverket (food waste, 833 kr per person per year), Swedbank (a packed lunch saves about 80 kr per lunch).
Plan your week in EpiHem
The meal plan is the week's menu in one place. Each day has a slot for lunch and one for dinner, and you fill them with recipes from your recipe book. Assign leftovers yourself, so today's stew can become tomorrow's lunch or dinner.
The point is that the plan and the shopping list are connected. Normally it is the other way around: you write the shopping list from what you remember the recipes need, shop, and by the time you come to cook you have either forgotten an ingredient or forgotten what you meant to make that day. EpiHem flips that. Once the recipes are in place for the week the list is almost done by itself, because each dish has its ingredients. You buy exactly what the week needs, ideally in one trip, instead of three trips to the shop that each end with a few extra impulse buys.
The shopping list, one tap away
When the week is planned you tap Generate. EpiHem adds up every ingredient, grouped by where the items sit in the shop, and puts them either in a new list or into an existing one. Before the list is created you see the whole summary and can untick what you already have at home, so the list only holds what you actually need to buy.
You decide when the list is created, or added to an existing one, and what goes in it. EpiHem handles the tally: adding up the ingredients and grouping them for you.
More than one meal a day when you need it
One evening the kids want pancakes and the adults want something else, another evening the kids eat at grandma's. So you are not locked to one dish per slot: you can add two or more meals to the same lunch or dinner, each with its own recipe and number of servings. In the plan above there are two dinners on Wednesday. If you cook the same dish several times in a week, the right quantities are added to the shopping list.
The recipe book keeps track of the recipes
Planning is built on the recipes, and they live in the recipe book. Here you gather the household's dishes, so you never have to hunt down that recipe again. You can search by name, filter by category such as stew or salad, and set your own tags, for example Packed lunch, Quick, Weeknight or Weekend, to find the right kind of dinner fast when it is time to plan.
And you do not have to type recipes in by hand. A recipe you have found can be imported straight away, from a link, a photo or pasted text, and EpiHem pulls out the ingredients and the steps for you.
Close the loop with receipts
Once you have shopped, you can close the loop. Scan the receipt, add a tag and link it to the shopping list you shopped from, and you can see afterwards exactly what was bought and what it cost. With tags you can also see, month by month, where the money went, whether on the weekly shop, a renovation or something else entirely.
Today's meals
You do not have to open the meal plan to remember what to cook. The overview shows today's lunch and dinner right away, so you have time to take the right things out of the freezer. And if tomorrow's dinner is missing, the overview reminds you under Now, with a link straight into the plan.
EpiHem is available on both mobile and the web, so whoever passes a shop on the way home sees the same plan and list as the rest of the household.
Getting started
Meal planning, the shopping lists written by the plan and the receipt links are part of EpiHem Premium, where one subscription covers the whole household. The shared calendar and the shared lists are free. Start free, add the planning when the routine feels worth it, and let the weekly menu write the shopping list rather than the other way around.
Less food waste is one of the quieter payoffs of a plan, best read as potential, not a promise. More on how meal planning and the shared lists work is on the feature pages.