One of our favorite things about freezer meals is the ability to plan ahead. It takes the guesswork out of dinner time (which is the worst part, right?), making your day much smoother and allows the evening to be about family time. 

Benefits of Meal Planning

1) Eliminate stress. If you’re one of those people who feels the worst part of dinner time is choosing what to make, you’re not alone. So, taking the time at the beginning of the month, or the beginning of the week, to map out your meals will eliminate the daily stress of choosing what to cook.

2) Save the planet. Planning ahead helps eliminate food waste. If you’re grocery shopping just for the meals you’ve planned, you’re less likely to buy things that go to waste. If you don’t need celery this week, don’t buy it to go limp and lame in your fridge! 

3) It’s oh-so-healthy. This could be a blog post in and of itself (and you can find a bunch if you do a quick search), but it’s one of our favorites. Meal planning helps you get variety in your diet, include fruits and veggies with every meal, and has been found to help prevent obesity (thank you portion control!). 

4) Time saver. Taking ten or fifteen minutes at the beginning of the week to plan meals and your grocery list will help you save time each day. You won’t have to stand at your open fridge or pantry wondering what to make. You’ll have all your ingredients already (no more last minute runs to the store), and you can even give your partner dinner duty. 

5) Budget helper. Nothing helps your grocery budget like having a plan. Impulse buys are no longer needed, you only have to get the ingredients you know you need for that specific meal, and you can order your groceries for pick-up or delivery with your plan in mind. Also, meal planning means you are less likely to eat out, which costs five times as much as making that same meal at home.

How Beehive Meals makes meal planning easy

One of the easiest ways to meal plan is to use freezer meals, especially if you subscribe to Beehive Meals. We use fresh, quality ingredients in every meal that you can save in your freezer for when it pops up on your weekly menu. We’re also committed to producing different meals every month, giving you the benefit of dietary variety. 

If you subscribe to Beehive Meals, you’ll have ten delicious meals delivered to your house every month that you can plug into that menu when you need it. If you look at your calendar and see a day full of soccer practice, piano lessons, and robotics club, you can put a Beehive Meal into that slot and know it will be taken care of. 

The truth is, we’re big meal planners ourselves.

How we meal plan

If you’re unsure of where to begin with meal planning, we’re here to help. In fact, we have a few resources that we use on the daily (weekly and monthly) that we’d love to share with you. 

When Allyse, our founder, sits down at the beginning of the month to plan her own family’s meals, she uses two things: a month calendar and a weekly template. Every dinner for the month gets plugged into the calendar, keeping schedules and vacations in mind, so she can plan ahead. 

Then, at the beginning of each week, Allyse checks out the monthly calendar and maps out her grocery plan for the week. As you can see on this template, there’s space for grocery lists and notes, outlining what sides we’ll use for dinner. If you want more ideas on how to use a specific Beehive Meal, we’ve got a lineup right here!

For example, if we’re planning on having Sloppy Joes on Friday, we’ll add buns, a veggie, and some homemade french fries to the grocery list, and notes on what time to put the meat in the slow cooker to the right. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. 

If you want to learn more about how Allyse plans, check out our family’s meal plan for this month, here!

Don’t wait! Start planning today

There’s no reason to wait. Start meal planning today. If you’re ready to make it even easier, order your first set of Beehive Meals now and get a jump start on meal planning for your family this month.