Grocery Budget Spreadsheet | Meal Planner, Automatic Grocery List, Price Book & Food Budget Tracker | USDA Benchmark | Excel Google Sheets

Spend less on groceries without spending your evenings on spreadsheets. Plan the week's meals, get the grocery list automatically (sorted by aisle, with costs and the cheapest store), log your receipts, and see how your family's spending compares with the USDA's official food plans.

WHAT'S INSIDE (9 TABS)

• Start Here: a 10-minute setup guide.

• Dashboard: groceries this month vs. budget, money left, eating out, all spending, number of grocery trips, your average grocery month, the USDA moderate plan for your household, this week's meal cost, meals planned and grocery list size. Also a month-by-month groceries-vs-budget chart, spending by store and this week's meal plan.

• Meal Plan: 7 days × breakfast, lunch, dinner and snack. Pick from your recipes in a dropdown (or type Leftovers / Eat out). You get an estimated cost for each day and the whole week.

• Grocery List: builds itself from the meal plan, sorted in YOUR store's aisle order. Shows quantity (multiplied if a recipe appears twice), unit, which recipe it's for, estimated cost and the cheapest store from your Price Book. Check items off as you shop. Add staples and extras on the side.

• Recipes: up to 40 recipes and 300 ingredient lines. You get the batch cost and cost per serving for each recipe, plus how often it's on this week's plan.

• Shopping Log: up to 400 receipts (date, store, category, amount), with month-by-month totals per category. Months over your grocery budget turn red.

• Price Book: prices for up to 100 items at 4 stores. It finds the cheapest store for each item, shows what you save vs. the priciest one, and counts which store wins most often.

• USDA Benchmark: add the people in your household (age & sex group). It calculates the USDA low-cost, moderate and liberal monthly food costs for your household (with USDA's household-size adjustment) and compares them with your average grocery month.

• Settings: household name, budgets for up to 5 spending categories, 4 stores and up to 14 aisles in your shopping order.

MADE FOR

• Families who want to stick to a grocery budget in 2027

• Meal planners and meal preppers who are tired of writing the same list every week

• Anyone comparing Aldi, Costco, Walmart, Kroger and other stores

• People who wonder "are we spending too much on food?" (the USDA benchmark answers it)

DETAILS

• Works in Microsoft Excel (desktop & web) and Google Sheets (upload to Google Drive, then Open with → Google Sheets)

• No macros, add-ons or sign-ups. Just a spreadsheet, and it works offline

• Comes filled with clearly labeled EXAMPLE data (a made-up family of four with 14 recipes, a week's meal plan, receipts from Jan–Oct 2026 and example store prices) so you can see how everything works. Delete the example rows and add your own

• USDA numbers: Official USDA Food Plans, Cost of Food at Home, U.S. average, September 2026. You can type newer monthly numbers over them anytime

• Instant digital download (1 .xlsx file)

PLEASE NOTE

This is a digital file. Nothing will be mailed to you. Example prices are made up for illustration and are not real store prices. The USDA food plans are a national-average benchmark, not a budget recommendation or advice. Amounts display with $; change the number format for another currency. The Grocery List lists each recipe's ingredients separately (identical items sit next to each other) rather than merging them. Apple Numbers and LibreOffice will open the file, but it is built for Excel and Google Sheets.