Planning meals saves money, but only if the grocery list is painless. Here's a two-tab sheet where you pick meals for the week and the shopping list (with an estimated cost) fills itself in.

Tab 1: Recipes

One row per ingredient, per recipe:

A: Recipe B: Ingredient C: Qty D: Unit E: Cost per unit
Chili Ground beef 1 lb 4.50
Chili Kidney beans 2 can 0.89
Tacos Ground beef 1 lb 4.50

Tab 2: Week

  • A2:A8: Monday to Sunday.
  • B2:B8: dinner. Add a dropdown with Data > Data validation > Dropdown (from a range) pointing at =UNIQUE(Recipes!A2:A).

The grocery list

In Week!D2, list every ingredient needed this week, combined:

=QUERY( FILTER(Recipes!B2:E, COUNTIF(B2:B8, Recipes!A2:A)), "select Col1, sum(Col2), Col3 group by Col1, Col3 label sum(Col2) 'Qty'", 0)

COUNTIF(B2:B8, Recipes!A2:A) returns how many nights each recipe row is planned. FILTER treats that count as true or false, so chili twice in a week still shows the ingredients only once. To scale for repeats, swap to the version below.

Scaling for repeat meals

Add a helper column F in Recipes:

=ARRAYFORMULA(IF(A2:A="",, C2:C * COUNTIF(Week!B2:B8, A2:A)))

Then point the QUERY at Recipes!B2:F and sum Col5 instead of Col2.

Estimated cost 

=SUMPRODUCT(Recipes!E2:E, Recipes!F2:F)

That's your weekly grocery estimate, and you can compare it against your food budget line.

Done

Change the dropdowns each Sunday and the list rebuilds.

If you'd rather grab a ready-made version, I make templates as Financely Templates (disclosure: these are my products):