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Based on 47 working weeks. A supermarket meal deal is one of the high street's genuine bargains vs cafe lunches, but batch-made packed lunches still halve it or better. The realistic play is a hybrid: pack the default, buy the treat.
What The Meal Deal vs Packed Lunch Calculator Works Out
- Meal deals per year: price x bought lunches a week x 47 working weeks. A five-day habit at GBP 3.75 runs about GBP 880 a year. The sandwich-snack-drink triad is priced as a loss-leader to capture lunchtime footfall, and against the cafe's GBP 8 equivalent it is the high street's best lunch value.
- Packed lunches per year: your per-lunch cost over the same days and weeks. Batch-made lunches land between GBP 1 and GBP 2 once the weekly shop absorbs the ingredients, about GBP 350 a year for the box.
- Yearly saving: the difference, around GBP 500 for the full switch, a gap that survives every honest adjustment for the occasional forgotten box and bought treat.
- Working weeks (advanced): 47 assumes 5 weeks of holiday and bank holidays; part-timers and term-time workers can set their own.
- Hybrid plan saving (advanced): the sustainable settlement most budgets land on: packed as the default, the meal deal as the deliberate treat or diary-chaos fallback. Enter the days you would still buy and see how much of the saving survives.
- Add-ons per year (advanced): the daily coffee-and-pastry or the delivery-app lunch, whose economics make the meal deal look monastic. A GBP 3 coffee on 5 days is another GBP 700 a year.
- Kit pays for itself in (advanced): decent sealing boxes, a flask and a lunch bag run GBP 20 to GBP 40 and pay back in a few weeks of lunches. The office microwave and fridge, where they exist, expand the repertoire past sandwiches entirely.
- Over the years (advanced): the yearly hybrid saving plus skipped add-ons, accumulated over your horizon, optionally invested at a growth rate (a cash ISA pays 4% to 5% in 2026), less the kit. Sunday batch logic (lunches assembled five at a time, or cooking six portions of dinner for four) defeats the 7am motivation collapse that kills the habit; menu boredom, not money, is the packed lunch's real modern problem.