I have a love/hate relationship with packing lunches.
My least favorite part of my morning routine, hands down, is making lunches. Still, I keep making them for husband, my second grader, and first grader.
I love how packing lunches saves us money.
If my husband were to eat out for lunch it would be a minimum of $6 a day (likely more). That would be $30 a week, $120 a month, or just under $1,500 a year. And that’s a very conservative number considering $6 per day is pretty low if you’re looking to get something nourishing.
If my kids were to buy a hot lunch at school it would cost $2.75 each or $5.50 a day for both of them. That’s $27.50 per week or $110 per month. For an entire school year of 180 days it would be nearly $1,000.
Since I don’t buy special prepackaged lunch snacks, the cost to make a homemade lunch is very, very low. Any lunch ingredients are a part of our normal $300 per month grocery budget, which consists of mainly produce and pantry staples.
Packing lunches saves our family somewhere around $2,500. Not too shabby.
But I get really tired of packing lunches.
Packing homemade lunches can be a lot of work, especially if you’re doing it on a rushed morning (and aren’t they all?).
Since we don’t usually buy pre-packaged lunch snacks (unless I find granola bars ultra cheap at Grocery Outlet) and I make our homemade bread for sandwiches (except when I don’t), there is some real preparation involved in getting supplies ready to make lunch.
Here are some ways I’ve minimized the time, effort, and cost required to make good healthy lunches for my family:
Bake in bulk and freeze
At the beginning of the school year, I decided to do a big baking day so I could fill the freezer with homemade lunch snacks that would make packing a lunch a cinch. I have don’t more bulk baking days and really love the results.
Here are some of the lunch snacks I made at the beginning of the school year.
I made about eight loaves of pumpkin bread and banana bread. I wrapped each serving (two half slices) in plastic wrap.
I made several dozen yellow squash muffins. I’ll share the recipe in the summer when we have yellow squash again.
I made a couple of pans of homemade no-bake chewy granola bars. I use a variation of this recipe.
Having lunch snacks in the freezer not only keeps the food fresher for longer, it also keeps them out of sight so they don’t disappear. I might be guilty of that otherwise.
Make-ahead sandwiches
One of my favorite lunch hacks is freezing sandwiches. We have peanut butter and jam sandwiches 99% of the time, which freeze like a dream!
I usually make four loaves of bread at a time. Usually we will eat one loaf right away. Warm bread and butter is a favorite snack for everyone. We will also have a slice with soup for dinner.
With the other three loaves, I make sandwiches (and more sandwiches and more sandwiches). I like to make three loaves of sandwiches all at once so I only have to clean up once.
I put each sandwich into its own fold-top sandwich bag, then put a whole loaf or bagged sandwiches into a bread bag and store it in the freezer.
When I’m assembling lunches in the morning, I grab a sandwich for each kid and 3-4 sandwiches for my husband. When lunchtime rolls around, the sandwiches are thawed. They are perfect and fresh like they were just made.
Single-serving containers.
At the grocery store, you pay a premium for single-servings. You’re paying for both the additional packaging and the convenience factor. For the slight additional work of putting food into individual containers and then washing the containers, you can save lots of money.
We use these Rubbermaid containers and absolutely love them. I have put soup, yogurt, fruit, and more in them and we have never had a leak.
This works great for canned fruit,
While the picture isn’t lovely, the yogurt-covered fruit salad was. After having it with dinner, I packaged the leftovers into single-serving containers to put in lunches. It’s easy to grab them as I fill lunch bags in the morning.
Prep fruits and veggies
It probably won’t surprise you that prepping fruits and veggies is another chore that I like to do in bulk.
Instead of buying baby carrots, I buy a 5- or 10-pound of whole carrots. I peel them, quarter them, and cut them for lunches. To prevent them from drying out, I keep the cut carrots in water (usually in the red-lid containers I mentioned above.
When I’m assembling lunches in the morning, I grab a handful of carrots and put them in a fold-top sandwich bag. The extra moisture helps them not to dry out in the bag. This method works great for celery too.
You can prep apples by cutting them and storing them in water with Fruit Fresh (or the citric acid you use when you make dishwasher detergent) to prevent browning. Honestly though, cutting apple slices is something I usually just do in the morning when I pack lunches. When everything else for the lunch is prepped, just slicing an apple isn’t so bad.
While I will be the first to admit that I’m not a big fan of packing lunches, I am happy to keep doing it for budget and health reasons. When I’m on top of my preparations like baking snacks, freezing sandwiches, storing leftovers in single-serving containers, and even prepping fruits and veggies, lunch prep is a breeze.
How about you?
- Does anyone else hate making lunches but do it anyway?
- What do you do to keep homemade lunches manageable?
This requires boiling water when you are ready to eat, so not kid lunchbox friendly. But for your husband or kid lunches at home it would be a fun makeahead. And they could do a lot of the prep.
You can take the recipe in a lot of directions, depending on what you may have on hand. Think odds and ends from the veggie him.
Besides, it just looks cool.
http://www.seriouseats.com/2014/09/diy-instant-noodle-cups-food-lab.html
I do a lot of the same things you do as well. I pack lunches for my two kids and myself. I usually take leftovers but they don’t want to wait in line to heat things so they do other stuff. My kids are in high school, my senior has never eaten a school lunch his entire school career. I should figure out how much money I’ve save over 13 years!
Our kids’ school has a “nude food” policy – anything individually wrapped or in little plastic baggies is not allowed. They can take little tupperware containers, but tend to lose them fairly regularly, which gets spendy. The policy drives me crazy because it makes advanced prep pretty hard. Couple that with the nut-free policy (pb&j are the only sandwiches my kids eat) and my kids being the pickiest kids in the world, and school lunches are sometimes painful. However, schools over here don’t have hot lunches (and my kids are so picky, even if the school had it I wouldn’t buy them because they’d only eat a quarter of the food so I’d be throwing money away); the little town where ours is has a general store that will take lunch orders, but there’s no way I’m paying $4 for a hot dog, so packed lunches it is!
Wow! That’s pretty crazy Becca! I have never heard of such a strict policy!
What do you do for lunch drinks?
That’s a good question! I send water bottles with them! 🙂
My older two (K & 2nd) only go to school twice per week, but the biggest way I save time is in having them pack their own lunches! I double check that they’re reasonably healthy and try to only keep options I’m ok with stocked in the fridge, but they’re pretty much on their own.
Having kids pack their own lunches is great. My kids don’t mind actually, but they definitely need to do it the night before because mornings are chaotic for sure!
Like you I absolutely hate making lunch boxes, but the costs for an alternative would be ridiculous, so I grit my teeth and we get on with it. To save the morning craziness, we make them in the evening after dinner. My boys make their own, although I often make the sandwiches for them. Most times the bread is straight from the freezer, but as you say it is perfect for when lunchtime comes around. Once the lunch boxes are made they are put straight in the fridge ready to be grabbed in the morning. Usually I rustle up some tray bake or chocolate banana bread which I freeze in portions ready to be added. I’ve been quite sick recently (recovering from brain tumour surgery) so we’ve relied on more shop bought snacks, but they have pushed the food budget up, so now I’m on the mend I plan to get back to baking again for my family. My husband is a chef so he eats at work for nothing, and once I return to work I will also be back to making my own lunches.
Yikes Katherine! I’m sorry to hear about your tumor. I hope you recover quickly. I would be buying snacks from the store too! That’s cool that your husband can eat at work! Glad you’re on the mend!
My youngest (of 4) is about to graduate from high school, so our lunch-making days are about to come to a close (he actually prefers to take a lunch as he says the lines at our big high school are too long). We did let the boys choose a couple of days a month to buy their lunch at times, but that was always a treat for them. My husband and I typically take a salad or leftovers for our own lunches.
One thing my boys liked was if we had leftover chicken, roast, or other similar meats I’d chop it up to place on a tortilla with some grated cheese, lettuce, etc., then roll it up. They seemed to like that change of pace. (Actually, I found out after the fact that son #2 would sell these to a friend, then have enough to go through the hot food line because he so seldom got to eat that!) When we’d get to the bottom of some foods I’d create my own trail mix with things like Cheerios/peanuts/raisins/snack crackers, etc. Then I’d usually have enough to divide among the boys for their snack. I’m anxious to try your granola bar recipe – they look yummy!
Some great tips! We do a lot of the same things with prepping veggies and freezing big batches of baking. My kids actually come home for lunch as our school district charges a supervision lunch fee of $255 per child. With 3 kids in school we save money by feeding them at home. I meal plan breakfast, lunch and dinners so that I can prep whatever I need to the night before. I try to make enough dinner each night so there is always left-overs for my husband to take for lunch. The one snack we do buy usually once a year is the big size 10 cans of freeze dried fruit. Then for a few months (usually in the winter time) they can get fruit in another form that they think tastes great! My kids also like taking popcorn for their snacks.
So do your kids go home for lunch in the middle of the school day?
We love dried fruit too! And popcorn is a good, frugal snack!
Yup, isn’t that crazy!? Sometimes in the winter we have to eat in the car because there just isn’t time to get home and back. Next year one of my kids is supposed to move to another school nearby that has different hours. That means 6 trips to the schools a day instead of the 4 I do now. It’s one of the reasons we’re looking at homeschooling.
I’ve never heard of something like that in elementary schools (except maybe 40 years ago!). Car picnic sounds like a great plan!
My daughter will be starting full-day kindergarten this fall (and actually had kindergarten round-up today) so will definitely keep these tips in mind for the fall. I’m curious if your kids ever ask to have the school lunch and what your response is.
That’s a good question Kathryn! When my kids get the school lunch menu each month, they talk about which lunches they would like to get. Sometimes they ask if they can get it or say that they want to spend their own money on it (they always decide it’s not worth it). Usually I just tell them how much it costs vs how much it costs to make it and they are cool with that. My kids go to a school where the majority of kids get free or reduced lunch, so sometimes my kids will tell me, “You don’t really have to pay mom. Some kids just say their name and they don’t have to pay.”
Recently we talked about letting the kids buy lunch every now and then as an incentive for working on something in particular (different for each child), but we haven’t done it yet.
I only pack lunch for myself, but I basically never get it together to make an actual lunch in the morning. Instead I usually pack five containers full of something on Sunday (often a grain/vegetable/cheese salad) and then can just pull them out of the fridge along with some fruit. Or I make a pot of hardboiled eggs and take a couple of those along with some bread and (again) fruit. The key is basically to never make myself do anything the morning of except pull some containers out of the fridge and stick them in my bag.
That’s great to take care of a whole week at a time!
I loved all your ideas, and I’ve done a lot of them (except the homemade bread – if I ever make that, it’s considered a treat :)). My girls loved plain cinnamon sprinkled on their apple sliced (I like it too). It avoids the discoloration and tastes good also! My girls are now 19 and almost 16, so I don’t do their lunches any more, but I do remember getting so tired of it. Good for you for sticking with it! Your family is getting food that is healthier and tastes so much better, too!
I’ll have to try the cinnamon trick! Thanks!
Love all these ideas! One thing I do to save time is pack lunch the night before and stick the entire lunchbox in the refrigerator. So in the morning all I have to do is grab the box and everything is already in it. However, I only have one child in school right now so if you have too many lunchboxes it might not work so well. I have really fell off the wagon lately with the packing of lunches. I always get burnt out toward the end of the school year. Paying $2.75 for lunches really stings.I try to pack everyday but sometimes I let my daughter eat in the lunchroom on pizza Fridays as a treat. When school starts back I will try premaking some snacks to make life easier. Thanks!
I know what you mean! I love not having to pack lunches all summer. By the time the fall rolls around, I’m ready to give it another go!