Family Meal Plan: 7 Dinners Kids Will Actually Eat

A family meal plan works when it has five planned dinners, one leftovers night and one night where everyone builds their own plate, with dishes the kids already know and only one new thing per week. For two adults and two small children, count about three adult portions, not four. Below you will find a sample week of seven dinners, the timings, ideas for using up leftovers and a way to keep one single grocery list for the whole household.

Updated October 2026. Sources: Federal Food Safety and Veterinary Office (BLV) and Swiss Society for Nutrition (SGE), Swiss nutrition recommendations 2024 (blv.admin.ch, seen 5 October 2026); Swissmilk, “Mengenberechnung pro Person” (seen 5 October 2026); SGE dairy portions for children, as reported by Switzerland Cheese Marketing (schweizerkaese.ch); foodwaste.ch, “Zahlen und Fakten zu Food Waste” (viewed on 5 October 2026); Migros press release of 26 January 2026 (Thursday start from 5 February 2026, also Denner); foodaktuell.ch, 21 January 2025 (Coop’s switch).

How do you plan a week of dinners for the whole family?

The hard part for a family is not finding recipes, it is fitting different tastes, different schedules and a single shop together. A family plan holds up when it follows three simple rules.

1. One shared base, the extras on the side. Pasta, rice, potatoes or polenta for everyone; sauces, vegetables and cheese go in separate bowls. The child who does not want peppers takes the pasta without, and nobody cooks two dinners.
2. One new dish a week, not seven. Six dishes the family already likes and one new one: if it flops, the week does not collapse.
3. Two nights without a recipe. One for leftovers and one where dinner is assembled at the table, such as pizza or wraps. These are the nights that save the week when something unexpected comes up.

The 2024 Swiss nutrition recommendations from BLV and SGE also give a useful frame for variety: pulses at least once a week, meat at most two or three times, and a plate made of two fifths vegetables, two fifths carbohydrates and one fifth protein. The week below follows them without any calorie counting.

Seven dinners kids actually eat: the sample week

The plan has meat three times (Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday with the leftover chicken), pulses on Saturday, and eggs on Thursday and Sunday. Thursday is deliberately a simple dinner: the weekly promotions at Coop (since January 2025) and at Migros and Denner (since 5 February 2026, Migros press release) start on Thursday, and if you do the big shop that day, dinner should ask very little of you. If your family has a fixed practice session or an evening shift, put the wraps or the omelette on that day, not the roast chicken.

How much should you cook for a family of four?

The values are the Swissmilk ranges multiplied by the number of portions. All the other quantities, from fish to cheese for fondue, are in the portion sizes per person chart.

How do you get kids involved in the meal plan?

• One dinner each. Every child picks one dinner of the week from the list of house dishes. Whoever chose it usually eats it.
• One job per age. The youngest wash the salad and top the pizza; the older ones grate, stir, lay the table or read the list out in the shop.
• The plan hangs in the kitchen. Knowing that Friday means pizza makes Tuesday’s vegetables easier to get through.
• The new dish next to a familiar one. The week’s new dish arrives alongside a side the kids like, not alone on the plate.

School, snacks and lunches: how do they fit into the plan?

A dinner plan only holds if it also thinks about the rest of the day. In school weeks it pays to decide the snacks together with the dinners, because they end up on the same list: ideas and costs are in the guide to school snacks and lunchboxes. Leftovers planned in advance, like Thursday’s omelette or Saturday’s lentil balls, become the packed lunch of anyone who eats away from home. And in holiday weeks, with the kids at home at midday, the plan counts two meals a day instead of one: better to notice before the shop than on Tuesday.

A family’s grocery budget depends on too many variables for one number that fits everybody: the children’s ages, the canton, habits. The official reference figures and the method for setting your own budget are in the guide to the grocery budget of a family of four. What a plan does reliably is cut waste: according to foodwaste.ch, each person in Switzerland throws away on average about 80 kg of food a year at home, worth about CHF 600.

One single grocery list for the whole household

In a family the grocery list fails for two reasons: two people buy the same thing, or nobody buys the milk. The fix is a single list that everyone updates and that whoever passes the shop has to hand. How to build it from the meal plan is in the guide to planning the weekly grocery shop, and the complete five-step planning method is in the guide on how to meal plan.

How does Rappn help with the family meal plan?

In Rappn’s Kitchen, under “Plan week”, you see the days with their dinners already decided and how many days are covered: with seven dinners planned the counter reads “7/7 days covered”. Each recipe shows kcal, minutes and servings, and the servings can be set for three or four people, with the quantities recalculated. From the plan you send the ingredients to the “Weekly shop” cart. Through the cart’s menu you share it, and your partner or the older kids can join it; whoever receives a shared cart taps “Join a cart” under “Your carts”. Items not yet assigned to a store sit under “To assign” until you pick one. What you share is the cart with its shopping list. The recipes come from external publishers named in the app; Rappn is free and has no commercial agreements with any supermarket.