Wyre residents offered free meal planning service to help save time, money and food waste

Wyre residents can currently sign up for Five Dinners for free, a meal planning service designed to make deciding what to cook each night easier.

The service creates a personalised meal plan and shopping list each week, based on individual preferences and eating habits. Once signed up, users choose their preferences and eating habits before receiving a new personalised meal plan every week, alongside a shopping list.

The service is designed to save time and money while also helping to reduce food waste.

Taking the stress out of mealtimes

Five Dinners is run by Theo and Anna Michaels, who developed the service after experiencing the challenges of planning family meals themselves.

The couple wanted to take the stress out of deciding what to cook each night, spend less money on food shopping, reduce food waste and generally make family life easier. They began meal planning at home, creating five easy, well-balanced recipes each week that would connect in some way.

For example, if they had something with rice on a Monday, they would make extra so they could use it to make stir-fried rice on Tuesday. The approach was intended to make dinnertimes faster while wasting less food.

Cutting the food bill in half

The Michaels found that their mid-week meals became easier almost overnight.

The stress of deciding what to cook had gone because that part of the process had already been done. They also stopped making trips to the shops during the week because they had bought everything they needed for their five dinners in one go. They said this also meant they managed to cut their food bill in half while wasting less food each week.

FiveDinners is born

The couple quickly realised that, despite the millions of recipes available online, there was not a service offering exactly what they wanted.

They ultimately created a weekly meal plan featuring easy, well-balanced recipes that children would actually eat, alongside a single shopping list containing all the ingredients needed for the whole week. That became FiveDinners.

After several months of creating meal plans, they were amazed by how well the system worked, although creating a proper weekly meal plan with all the ingredients combined into one shopping list was hard work.

However, they found the benefits were worth it, with calmer mealtimes, a clear idea of what they were cooking and all the necessary ingredients already available. For the family, it also meant saving a significant amount of money.

Tackling common meal planning problems

After speaking with friends and family, Theo and Anna realised the concept of a meal plan was something people liked, but many encountered the same obstacles.

These included not being able to decide what to cook each night, not having time to plan in advance, being overwhelmed by the millions of recipes available online and still having to work through numerous ingredient lists to work out what to buy.

FiveDinners was created to address these issues. Its approach is summed up as: "Five recipes, one shopping list – time to make life easy again!"

One shop for the week

Members can use the service to get everything they need in one go, either by visiting the shops or shopping online, with the aim of saving money and avoiding the headaches associated with meal planning.

Serving sizes can be changed to suit individual families, with the shopping list automatically adjusting to reflect the changes. Recipes can also be tweaked for a more flexitarian approach.

Wyre residents can currently sign up for Five Dinners for free and begin receiving personalised weekly meal plans and shopping lists based on their preferences and eating habits.