What Actually Goes Into a Week of Dinner Daily Meals?

When you receive a Dinner Daily meal plan, what you see is pretty simple: dinners for the week, appropriately paired sides, and an organized shopping list. It’s easy to use, with most of the planning and decision-making already done for you.

And that’s exactly how it should feel.

But there is quite a bit that goes into creating that plan before it gets to you. It isn’t simply a matter of finding five recipes, putting them together into a meal plan, and calling it a week.

So, this week I thought it would be interesting to show you how it actually works. And at the end of this post, we’re sharing a real Dinner Daily menu and shopping list based on this week’s specials at Stop & Shop in New England. If you shop there, you can use the plan with the current sales. If you don’t, you can still use the menu since the ingredients are readily available at most major grocery stores. The only difference is that the items shown on sale on the shopping list won’t apply to your store.

But first, here’s what goes into creating it.

It Starts With Recipes Designed for Real Weeknights

Before a recipe can ever show up on one of our menus, it has to meet our standards for a weeknight dinner.

All of our recipes are created in-house. Some come from my own family or the families of our team members. Others are developed by registered dietitians we work with or trained professional cooks.

But regardless of where a recipe starts, it has to be practical.

We don’t use recipes with a long list of specialty ingredients that require you to spend $6 on a jar of something, use one teaspoon, and then push it to the back of the fridge until you eventually throw it away.

We also don’t assume you have advanced cooking skills. In fact, we develop our recipes assuming the cooking knowledge of a teenager. If your teenager happens to be in charge of getting dinner started one night because you’re running late, we want that recipe to work for them, too.

And our recipes are tested by home cooks. A recipe can sound great on paper, but what really matters is whether it works in a regular kitchen, on a regular weeknight. This isn’t about impressing anyone at the dinner table. It’s about getting dinner made as easily as possible so you can actually enjoy the time around the table with your family. Save the dinner-party recipes for Saturday night.

Then We Factor In What’s on Sale at Your Store

Store specials have been part of The Dinner Daily from the very beginning.

When I first developed this meal planning process for my own family, our food spending was out of control. I started using my grocery store’s weekly specials as the foundation of our planning, particularly for some of the more expensive items on the list such as proteins and produce.

It made a significant difference. In fact, when we’ve tested identical shopping lists with and without the weekly specials, we’ve found the cost can be about 20% to 25% less when those sale items are incorporated into the plan.

So we built that concept into The Dinner Daily.

Today, our technology collects the relevant weekly sales data for the stores we support. But we don’t simply let the automation run and assume everything is correct. Our team reviews the sales data each week to make sure it is aligned with our recipe database, and that the sale info on the shopping list will actually help you while shopping in the store or online.

And importantly, something being on sale doesn’t automatically mean it belongs on your menu. We have dollar cut offs for different categories of food. For instance, if a certain cut of steak is on sale for $15.99, we don’t use it since that is not what we consider an economical choice for a family dinner.

The software does the heavy lifting, which allows us to do this across many stores and for thousands of members. But we’ve always kept human involvement in the process, and that’s intentional.

Five Good Recipes Don’t Necessarily Make a Good Weekly Meal Plan

This is the part of meal planning that I think is easy to overlook.

You could find five perfectly good recipes online, put them together for the week, make a shopping list or have it generated, and technically have a meal plan.

But will those five meals actually work well together over the course of a week?

That’s a different question.

Over the years, we’ve developed hundreds and hundreds of guidelines that our system uses when creating menus. We think about the week as a whole, not just each individual recipe.

For example, we look for a balance of proteins, flavors and cooking styles. We don’t want to give you a week where every meal feels the same or where every dinner requires lots of active cooking and cleanup. You won’t see five main dishes that all rely on cheese, for example, or vegetables in the main dish unnecessarily repeated in the sides.

We also pay attention to practical details that can make a surprisingly big difference. If a main dish and side need to be in the oven at the same time, for instance, the oven temperatures need to be same.  We all know how frustrating it is to get the main meal prepped and in the oven at 350 degrees, to then realize the side needs an oven temp of 425.

Sides also need to make sense with the main dish. So mains that have more chopping and cooking steps will be paired with a super simple side. And the overall week needs enough variety without becoming complicated.

These might sound like small things individually. But together, they’re what can make the difference between five recipes and a dinner plan you can actually use.

We Built Our Technology Around That Human Experience

Of course, The Dinner Daily isn’t a team of people sitting around manually writing individual menus for every member each week. In fact, our menu creation software has created over one million menus to date.

When I originally started doing this for my own family, I was doing it myself. I was looking at the weekly flyer, figuring out what meals would work for my family, creating the shopping list, and trying to make the whole week fit together. And I was determined to save money on groceries each week.

It worked, but it was a manual process I had created to solve the problem for my own family.

That experience became the foundation for the technology behind The Dinner Daily. I wanted to take the process that had made such a difference for my own family and build a system that could do that work for other families.

Today, our software brings together the pieces we’ve built over the years: our tested recipe library, store specials, dietary needs and preferences, serving sizes, menu-curation guidelines and more.

That allows us to create personalized plans at scale without losing the practical thinking of real home cooks that the system was built on in the first place.

In other words, the technology came from the real-life process, not the other way around.

And I think that’s a really important distinction.

Want to Give It a Try? Here Is a Real Dinner Daily Plan You Can Use This Week

Rather than just explain all of this, we thought we’d give you an actual plan to try.

Below you’ll find five Dinner Daily dinners with appropriately paired sides, along with the organized shopping list.

This particular menu is based on this week’s specials at Stop & Shop in New England, for the sales period Friday, August 7 through Thursday, August 13.

Stop & Shop Menu August 7th to August 13th 

Stop & Shop Shopping List August 7th to August 13th

If you shop at Stop & Shop, great, you can take advantage of the specials this menu was built around.

If you shop somewhere else, you can still use it. These aren’t specialty ingredients that can only be found at one particular store. The only difference is that some of the ingredients may or may not be on sale where you shop this week.

Either way, I hope it makes dinner a little easier for you this week.

Want a Plan Built Around Your Store, Your Preferences, and Your Family?

The sample above gives you a good idea of what a Dinner Daily plan looks like, but members receive plans personalized for their own needs.

That means we can take into account your food preferences and dietary needs (including options such as gluten-free, dairy-free and heart-healthy) and base your meals on the specials at the grocery store where you actually shop.

And your organized shopping list is created right along with your menu.

It’s all the planning work I used to do for my own family, built into a system so you don’t have to spend your time doing it yourself.

If that would make your weeknights a little more manageable, you can try The Dinner Daily free for 14 days.