Meal planning around grocery sales is building the week's meals from what's on sale, instead of from a recipe list. Most families plan their meals, then go to the grocery store and pay full price for whatever they wrote down. But what if you flipped that? What if you started with this week's best deals, then built your meal plan around them?
Meal planning around sales gives families a simple weekly routine: eat well, spend less on groceries, and stop asking "what's for dinner?" every night. A plan also cuts food waste. The average Canadian household throws out 140 kg of food a year, at a cost of more than $1,300, and 63% of it could have been eaten, according to Love Food Hate Waste Canada (from the National Zero Waste Council's 2017 household food waste study).
The five steps below work whether you plan meals by hand or use a meal planner like Forkfull.
Why Meal Plan Around Sales?
Traditional meal planning works backward. You decide what you want to eat, then you buy those ingredients at whatever price the store asks. Paying the regular price for every ingredient is the expensive way to shop.
Grocery stores run promotions every week on specific products—chicken, ground beef, produce, dairy, pantry staples. Grocery sales follow predictable patterns and rotate regularly. The insight is simple: if you plan meals around what's actually on sale, you buy ingredients that are already marked down.
Why it works: without a plan, most of a family's protein and produce is bought at the regular price. Planning dinners around what's on sale moves that spending onto discounted items, without changing what you eat or where you shop.
Step 1: Check This Week's Flyers
Most Canadian grocery chains start a new weekly flyer on Thursday or Friday, online and in flyer apps. Look for:
- Loss leaders: Heavily discounted items stores use to draw customers (chicken at $4.99/lb instead of $9.99)
- Bulk/multi-buy deals: "Buy 2 get 1 free" or "$5 for 3" on shelf-stable items
- Seasonal produce: What's in season this time of year (cheaper and better quality)
- Pantry staples: Olive oil, pasta, rice, beans—buy when they're on sale, use throughout the month
The key to reading a flyer: look for what's actually discounted and good quality, not what sounds good. A sale on a specialty item you rarely buy saves little. A sale on a protein your family eats every week adds up, per meal.
Step 2: Pick 5 Proteins/Mains from the Sales
Once you've identified this week's best deals, choose 5 different proteins or mains that are on sale. For a family of 4–5 eating dinner together 5 nights a week, pick:
- 2–3 proteins (chicken, ground beef, fish, etc.)
- 1–2 vegetarian mains (pasta, bean-based, etc.)
- Flexible sides or leftovers for the 5th night
The five discounted mains are the anchor of the week. Vegetables, grains and seasonings build around them.
Step 3: Build Complete Meals with Sides & Produce
For each main, add 1–2 sides (vegetables, grains, etc.) that are *either on sale or inexpensive staples*. For example:
Example meal: Chicken on sale + seasonal broccoli + rice = complete dinner. If all three are on sale, even better. If only chicken is discounted, that's fine—broccoli and rice are cheap base items that round out the meal.
The goal is complete, satisfying meals (protein + vegetable + grain/carb) where the protein or at least one other component is discounted, pulling down the overall meal cost.
Step 4: Create Your Shopping List (Organized by Sale Items)
Once your 5 meals are planned, create a shopping list organized two ways:
- By meal: So you know what you need for dinner Monday, Tuesday, etc.
- By sale item: So you remember which deals you're shopping for and don't miss them
Smart list-makers also add quantities and check the flyer price before heading to the store, so they know which deals are worth stocking up on.
Step 5: Shop Once, Cook Multiple Days
Cooking extra is where the time goes further: when you cook one of your planned meals, prep extra. Cook double the chicken. Make extra rice. Roast extra vegetables. Use the extras for lunches, breakfasts, or "remix meals" during the week (chicken salad, fried rice, tacos).
Cooking once for two or three meals cuts waste and cooking time during the week, and stretches each discounted ingredient further. Waste adds up across the country: Environment and Climate Change Canada estimates that 20% (11 million tonnes) of all the food produced in Canada each year becomes avoidable food loss or waste.
Common Pitfalls (& How to Avoid Them)
1. Buying sales you don't actually cook with
A great deal on fancy cheese doesn't matter if your family won't eat it. Stick to proteins and items you know your family actually uses.
2. Forgetting to stock pantry basics
When oil, vinegar, pasta or rice go on sale, buy extra. Oil, vinegar, pasta and rice are shelf-stable staples that last months. A stocked pantry keeps the grocery bill down on slower sale weeks.
3. Overcomplicating the meal plan
You don't need to cook five completely different meals from scratch. Many meal prep folks repeat a base (like "rice bowl" or "pasta") and change the protein/vegetable based on sales.
4. Not accounting for family preferences
Build the meal plan around foods your family actually eats. A $3 per pound sale on something nobody wants is a waste.
How Much Can You Actually Save?
How much meal planning around sales saves depends on your store, your family and what's on sale that week, so we won't promise a number. Grocery prices move every month, too: Statistics Canada's Consumer Price Index (Table 18-10-0004-01) tracks them monthly. What a sale-based plan changes is where the money goes:
- Without a plan: you buy what the recipes call for, mostly at the regular price, plus extras that go to waste.
- With a plan: you buy only what the week's dinners need, so less is thrown out.
- With a plan built on sales: the biggest items in the cart, usually meat and produce, are the ones on sale.
Forkfull shows the difference for your own cart: what this week's sale prices saved compared with the usual price.
The difference between good meal planning and great meal planning is building around the deals actually running that week.
Automate It (Optional)
Checking flyers, finding the deals and planning meals by hand can take an hour or two a week. If you like doing it yourself, great. A meal planner like Forkfull does the same steps for you:
- Scan your local grocery store flyers
- Identify this week's best deals
- Generate a complete meal plan around them
- Create an organized, de-duplicated grocery list
Forkfull does those four steps in a few minutes, from your budget and your store's flyer.
Get Started This Week
You don't need a tool to meal plan around sales. To see what's on sale near you, open this week's grocery deals for your city:
See what's on sale in your area this week, pick a couple of discounted proteins, and build your first sale-based meal plan.