How to Start Meal Prepping: A 5 Step Beginner’s Guide

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When I first stumbled across meal prep in 2015, I had virtually no idea how to start meal prepping. Well, I’ve been meal prepping now for over 7 years and during that time, I’ve learned so much about how to save time, money, and effort with meal prep. In this meal prep beginner’s guide, I’m going to share everything I know about how to properly meal prep — including all of my beginner-friendly tips and a step-by-step guide on how to get started with meal prep today.

Jump To:

• How does meal prep work?
• What are the benefits of meal prepping?
• Who should meal prep?
• How to meal prep: the basics
• How long will meal prep last?
• Get started with meal prep today

How does meal prep work?

Meal prep is the method of planning and preparing meals or food ingredients ahead of time. With meal prep, there’s no pressure to plan a new menu, shop for ingredients, or cook new meals every single day. Instead, meals are prepared ahead of time once or twice a week and reheated whenever you’re ready to enjoy them.

Meal prep is without a doubt one of the best ways to save time, money, and effort in the kitchen. It’s also a great way to be able to enjoy your favorite homecooked meals throughout the week. In my experience, just these two benefits alone are enough to make meal prep worth it for so many people.

What are the benefits of meal prepping?

Anyone who regularly meal preps will tell you that there are so many benefits to meal prepping. Once you learn how to start meal prepping, you’ll save more time in the day, spend less money on groceries, and much more. In fact, here are my top 5 reasons for learning how to meal prep.

1. You’ll spend less time in the kitchen

For most people, there just isn’t enough time in the day to cook breakfast, lunch, and dinner from scratch. Between work, school, relationships, kids, and hobbies, most people just don’t have the time to cook new meals every single day.

Meal prep can help limit the amount of time you spend cooking during the week. It allows you to prepare all the meals you need in a few short hours a week instead of being stuck in the kitchen for hours each day.

2. You’ll lower your weekly grocery bills

If you’re someone who budgets each month, then you already know how important it is to keep your grocery bill as low as possible. And there’s nothing worse than spending more than you budgeted for the week on groceries because you didn’t have a plan.

Meal planning and prepping for the week can help you cut down on unexpected grocery costs. It’s also a great way to reduce or eliminate food waste, which helps save you more money in the long run.

3. You’ll reduce your dining out expenses

Eating fast food out of necessity is not something that most people enjoy doing, but this happens all too often when you’re too busy to cook. And because dine-out meals aren’t cheap, these expenses can easily add up if you eat out enough.

Meal prep is one of the best ways to ensure that you avoid extra dine-out expenses by having meals ready and available to eat. Plus, when you do finally choose to dine out, you can enjoy it without breaking the bank.

4. You’ll enjoy more homecooked meals

There are few things more enjoyable than eating a nice meal at a dine-in restaurant with family or friends. Well, except for eating a homecooked meal that you’ve spent time preparing just the way you like it, that is.

Meal prep allows you to enjoy more of the homecooked meals you (and your family) love throughout the week. It’s also a great way to make sure that you’re getting a wide variety of foods and nutrients, just like our bodies need and love.

5. You’ll save time, money, and energy

It can be easy to fall into the habit of not having enough time to cook — not to mention spending too much money on food and quickly running out of energy each day. In fact, most of us struggle to find ways to balance these areas of our lives every day.

Meal prep can help you save on all three of these “resources” if you make it a regular part of your life. And saving more time, money, and energy at home means that you can use those resources for the things that are really important to you.

Who should meal prep?

One of the best things about meal prepping is that anyone can benefit from learning how to meal prep. However, over the years, I’ve learned that meal prep is generally most helpful for:

• people who want to save money, especially those who are on a monthly food budget
• people with busy schedules, such as full-time students or people with full-time jobs
• parents with toddlers or teenagers, especially those who pack lunches during the school week
• people who work out, including those who want to keep track of calories, macros, or other nutritional information
• people with specific dietary needs, such as those on medical diets recommended by their doctor

If you find yourself fitting into more than one of these groups (which many of us do), then meal prep is definitely something that you could benefit from. But even if you’re not on a strict budget or struggling with a busy schedule, that doesn’t mean you can’t still benefit from giving meal prep a try.

How to meal prep: the basics

If you’ve never meal prepped before, you might be surprised to learn just how easy it is. In fact, many of the steps I’ve outlined below are probably already a part of your regular cooking routine in some way.

Still, having a guide to refer to when you’re learning how to properly meal prep can help things run more smoothly, especially in the beginning. So, here’s everything you need to know about how to start meal prepping in five easy steps.

Step 1: Choose a prep day

One of the easiest ways to consistently meal prep is to choose the same meal prep day each week.

Your meal prep day should be a consistent day every week that you can comfortably set aside a few hours for planning, shopping, and cooking. Sunday is the most common meal prep day, especially for people who have a busy schedule on Monday-Friday. However, Wednesday is also another common meal prep day for people with a busy weekend schedule.

It’s entirely up to personal preference whether you choose to meal prep once or twice a week. For example, if you’re someone who works 5 days in a row, you may only have enough energy to prep once a week. But if you’re someone who wants more weekly menu variety, you may want to prep on two separate days.

Once you set a prep day (or days) in your schedule, try your best to stick to it each week. It may take a few weeks to figure out which days work best for you, but that’s okay. As long as you follow your weekly schedule, you can have meals to look forward to regardless of whatever else may come up during the week.

Step 2: Create a menu

Meal planning is one of the most important elements of meal prep because a solid meal plan will always help you feel more prepared for the week ahead.

When you make your weekly meal plan, the first thing you’ll want to do is figure out how many days you want to meal prep for. Then, you’ll need to decide which meals you want to prep. For example, will you prep just lunch and dinner, or do you also want to prep breakfast foods?

After considering which meals you need to prep for the week, it’s time to narrow down your menu. One of the best things about creating a meal prep menu is that the possibilities for recipes are endless. However, this can also make meal planning feel overwhelming at first — especially if you’ve got too many recipe choices.

So, if this is your first time meal prepping, you can use this simple formula to brainstorm some beginner-friendly meal prep recipe ideas:

• choose a protein (meat, beans, tofu, etc.)
• choose a vegetable (broccoli, green beans, leafy greens, etc.)
• choose a grain (rice, pasta, quinoa, etc.)

Using this formula, you can easily come up with ideas for your own basic recipes. For example, baked chicken, roasted broccoli, and white rice is one of the most popular beginner-friendly recipes. But if you’re feeling adventurous, you can even take those same ingredients and search for recipes that contain chicken, broccoli, and rice (like cheesy chicken and broccoli casserole, for example).

Another thing to remember when meal planning is to choose recipes with similar ingredients. If you can create different recipes around a similar meat, vegetable, or grain, you’ll have less ingredients to buy. For example, if your main protein for the week is chicken, you can make both chicken tacos and chicken curry. You can even switch up similar ingredients with different sauces and condiments to mix things up even more.

Step 3: Shop for groceries

Everybody loves saving time and money at the grocery store — and this is so much easier to do when your meals are already planned out for the week.

Once you’ve created your weekly menu, coming up with the grocery list is a breeze. All you need to do is tally up the ingredients you’ll need for your weekly recipes and add them to your shopping list. This allows you to shop quickly and easily without falling into the trap of wasting money on ingredients you don’t need.

Here’s another question to ask yourself before you make a trip to the store: is there anything that you can buy in bulk? Purchasing food items in bulk is a great way to save money when you meal prep. And while not every ingredient should be bought in bulk, here are some bulk-friendly ingredients that can help you save money on food costs:

• dried grains
• dried and canned beans
• dried fruits and nuts
• frozen meats
• frozen vegetables
• certain oils and vinegars

And remember: don’t limit yourself to only big box stores like Kroger, Walmart, or Costco when grocery shopping. You can also often find affordable pantry staples in bulk at your local Indian, Korean, or specialty grocery store, for example. Plus, you might even find recipe inspiration for your weekly menu when you see new ingredients that you don’t normally use.

Step 4: Cook your meals

Before you even begin cooking your meals, you’ll want to decide what meal planning approach you want to take. There are two primary methods of meal prepping:

• Portioned meal prep. Portioned meal prep is when you prep a recipe and portion it out into individual containers.
• Buffet style meal prep. Buffet meal prep is when you prep ingredients separately and build each meal from the “buffet” of ingredients.

Once again, the type of meal prep you choose to is all about personal preference. My favorite way to meal prep is portioned meal prep, but I also like to use buffet style meal prep on weeks where I’m craving more menu variety.

As soon as you’ve decided how you want to prep your meals, the next step is easy: start cooking! And you don’t have to be a professional chef or even an experienced home cook to do this step. In fact, the only skill that’s necessary is a basic knowledge of cooking, the ability to follow a recipe (or multiple recipes), and the right kitchen tools. Luckily, most people can easily prep all the meals they need with the tools available in their kitchen right now.

Step 5: Portion and store food

Even though it can be tempting to throw your perfectly prepped food into your meal prep containers and call it a day, it’s important to learn how to store meal prep properly. Why is this step important? Because the way you store your meal prep can either make or break the meals you’re planning to enjoy for the next week.

When you’re portioning your meals into their respective containers, pay close attention to how you are storing your ingredients. For example, you don’t want to store an ingredient that could potentially get soggy — like bread — next to something that has a high liquid content. And you probably don’t want to cut or prep ingredients that can become brown or mushy — like avocado — too far ahead of time, either.

Luckily, there are plenty of different meal prep containers on the market that can make it easier to properly store your food. Here are just a few of the different types of containers I’ve come across in my time meal prepping:

• plastic containers
• glass containers (my favorite!)
• bamboo or stainless-steel containers
• single-compartment containers
• two-compartment containers
• multiple-compartment containers
• snack size containers
• large size containers
• … and so many more!

Choosing the right containers for your meal prep does require some research on your part but luckily, major retailers such as Amazon, Target, and Walmart offer a huge variety of meal prep and food storage containers to get you started. However, if you need a little help on your research, click here to see my guide on where to buy meal prep containers (including my top 9 personally tested choices)!

Meal prep food safety

When storing food of any kind, including meal prep, unsafe cooling and storing habits can be dangerous. Without proper meal prep food safety, you may risk exposing yourself to bacteria and other organisms that can potentially make you sick.

So, when you’re cooking and storing your meal prep, here are the most important food safety tips to keep in mind:

1. Don’t let your food sit out. Never leave your food out to cool for longer than 2 hours, as this can increase the risk of bacteria growing on it and making you sick.
2. Pay attention to the temperature. When the temperature in the environment is higher than normal, try not to leave your food out to cool for longer than 1 hour.
3. Portion out larger recipes. Separating large batches of food into smaller portions can help your food cool faster. You can also use ice water baths to cool your food more quickly.
4. Get containers into the fridge. After your food has been portioned into containers, make sure to keep your meals refrigerated until you’re ready to eat them.

And when it’s time to reheat your food, don’t forget to follow food reheating guidelines and reheat your foods to the correct temperature.

How long will meal prep last?

Even the best meal prep containers won’t keep food fresh in the fridge forever. However, when stored correctly, meal prep can usually last for 3-4 days in the fridge, depending on the recipe.

Below, I’ve included some of the most commonly cooked meal prep ingredients and their recommended “use by” dates:

• meat, poultry, seafood & eggs: 3-4 days
• tofu: 4-5 days
• vegetables: 3-4 days
• fruit, pasta, & potatoes: 3-5 days
• rice: 3-4 days
• other grains: 3-4 days

One thing to keep in mind is that a variety of factors can impact how long your food stays fresh — including how safely you cooled and stored your food, how airtight your containers are, and how your food was transported. Any one of these factors can affect the freshness of your food, so it’s important to make sure to follow proper food storage and transportation guidelines.

With that being said, my number one recommendation for keeping your meal prep fresh is to buy good meal prep containers. Although glass food storage containers are pricier than plastic food storage containers, airtight glass meal prep containers are some of the best containers you can buy. Not only do they last longer, but they also help keep your meals fresh for longer, too.

Get started with meal prep today

Now that you’ve learned how to start meal prepping, the next step is simple: give it a try!

If you’re hesitant about diving into meal prep right away, you can always start with something simple like prepping your meal ingredients ahead of time. This can include things like chopping up vegetables, portioning out grains, or doing anything else that saves you time when you cook.

Once you’re ready, you can move onto something like meal prepping your breakfast each week. This small step can help you get into the habit of weekly meal prep. And once you’ve made this a habit, you can consider adding in more meals, like lunch and dinner.

With enough practice, you’ll see just how easy (and fun) it is to meal prep your way through an entire week.