Camping Meal Planner & Grocery List
Pick your meals, set how many people and how many days, and get four things at once: a menu, a grocery list with real quantities, a cooler plan that says what must stay cold and roughly how much ice that needs, and a rotating duty roster so the same two people are not cooking every night. Everything stays on this device: no account, no login, nothing sent anywhere.
1. Your trip
2. Pick the meals
Add as many dishes per slot as you like. Quantities scale automatically: one kid counts as 0.6 of an adult portion.
Add your own dish
Format: name qty unit, separated by semicolons. Add the word cold if it belongs in the cooler. Units: lb, oz, ea, cup, tbsp, gal.
3. Who is coming (for the duty roster)
Add names and the tool builds a rotating duty roster: who cooks, who assists, who cleans up and who handles fire and water, for every meal of the trip. Leave this empty if you only want the grocery list.
Which jobs to rotate
Four jobs per meal works for most groups. Two is enough for a family; add "Water run" and "Bear bag" for bigger camps.
Menu
Grocery list
Cooler & water
Duty roster
4. After the trip: what did you get wrong?
This is the part no printable planner can do. Mark what you had too much of or ran out of, and the next trip's quantities adjust for you.
5. Save & export
Delete everything
This removes every trip, saved menu and adjustment stored in this browser. There is no copy on a server, so there is nothing to restore from.
Both steps above are still open.
Why quantities are the whole problem
Almost every camping meal planner you can download is a blank grid. It gives you rows for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and then leaves you standing in the shop doing arithmetic in your head: six people, three days, two of them kids, how many packs of sausages is that?
That arithmetic is where trips go wrong in both directions. Over-buy and you drive home with a cooler of grey mince you have to throw out. Under-buy and day three is crisps for dinner. Neither shows up on a printable template, because a template cannot multiply.
How the numbers here are worked out
Portions come from ordinary catering rules of thumb, not from anything invented for this page:
- Meat as the main dish: about 8 oz (½ lb) per adult, up to 12 oz for big appetites (The Kitchn).
- Drinking water: 1 gallon per person per day, covering drinking and washing (Ready.gov). If you are also cooking pasta or washing up in drinking water, add more.
- Ice: roughly two pounds of ice for every pound of cold food and drink on a multi-day trip, about one-to-one on a day trip (Weeknd Warrior). This tool weighs only the items you actually planned, so the number moves when your menu does.
- Kids count as 0.6 of an adult portion. That is a planning convention, not a measurement. A hungry eleven-year-old eats like an adult; a picky four-year-old eats a third. Adjust the adult count if your group is unusual.
The cooler is the constraint nobody plans for
Menus fail on day three, not day one. Everything is cold on day one. What matters is which items must stay below roughly 40 °F for the whole trip and whether your ice can carry them that far. That is why the cold items are pulled into their own list here, with an ice estimate attached, instead of being scattered through a shopping list.
Two practical consequences: plan the meat-heavy meals for the first two days and the shelf-stable ones for the end, and buy block ice for cooling and bagged ice for drinks. Block ice lasts noticeably longer because it has less surface area for its weight.
The duty roster is a fairness problem, not a scheduling one
Every printable campout planner has a duty roster grid, and every one of them is blank. Filling it in by hand is where the unfairness creeps in: the reliable teenager ends up on clean-up four times because their name is easy to write down, and the quiet one does nothing all weekend and nobody notices until the drive home.
So the number this tool puts at the top of the roster is not "roster complete". It is jobs per person, with anyone on zero called out by name. That is the thing that causes an argument, and it is invisible on a paper grid until the trip is over.
The rotation itself is deliberately simple: jobs shift by one position each meal, so nobody gets the same duty twice in a row. Snacks are excluded, because a formal clean-up crew for trail mix is theatre. Change any cell by hand and the rest of the roster keeps rotating around it — the manual pick is remembered and marked.
What this tool does not do
- It does not sync. Data lives in this browser only. Open it on your phone and you start empty.
- It disappears if you clear your browser data. Export the JSON backup before wiping anything.
- It is not a food safety authority. The ice estimate is a planning figure, not a guarantee that your cooler held temperature. Use a thermometer for anything you actually worry about.
- It does not track allergens. Ingredients are listed as written; nothing checks them against allergies or dietary restrictions.
- It does not price anything. Shop prices vary too much between countries and shops for a number here to mean anything.
- The duty roster does not know your people. It spreads jobs evenly by position, not by who is actually capable of running a stove. Override the cells that matter.
Questions people actually ask
How much food do I need for 3 days of camping?
For an adult, plan roughly 8 oz of main-dish meat per dinner, one substantial breakfast, one cold or quick lunch and two snacks per day. Over three days that is about 1½ lb of meat, half a dozen eggs, a loaf of bread and a gallon of water per person per day. Build the menu above and the tool does the multiplication for the group you actually have.
How much ice do I need for a 3-day camping trip?
Work from weight, not days. The common ratio is two pounds of ice per pound of cold food and drink for a multi-day trip, and one-to-one for a day trip. A cooler holding 20 lb of food and drink therefore wants roughly 40 lb of ice for a long weekend. Cooler quality, how often the lid opens and outside temperature all move that a lot.
How much water per person per day for camping?
One gallon per person per day is the standard planning figure, covering drinking and basic washing. Hot weather, hiking, or cooking that uses drinking water push it higher. If the campground has potable water on site, you only need to carry what you drink between refills.
How much food does a child eat compared to an adult?
For planning purposes, about 60%. That is a convention rather than a fact — teenagers routinely eat more than adults, and toddlers eat a fraction. If your group skews one way, count the teenager as an adult and the toddler as nothing rather than fighting the ratio.
Do I need an account or an app for this?
No. It runs in the browser tab you already have open. Nothing is uploaded and nothing is stored outside this device. The trade-off is that it does not follow you to another device — use the JSON export if you want to move a trip.
Can I print just the shopping list?
Yes. Printing produces the menu, the grocery list and the cooler plan as a clean document without the buttons and controls. If you only want the list in the shop, the checkboxes work on paper as well as on screen.
What if I always buy too much of something?
That is what the adjustment section is for. Mark an item as "had too much" and its quantity drops by a quarter next time; mark it "ran out" and it rises by a quarter. The adjustments are stored with your data and applied to every future trip until you reset them.
Does this work for group camping — scouts, church groups, family reunions?
Yes, up to about 60 people. Set the adult and child counts to the whole group and the quantities scale directly. For very large groups, plan per patrol or per cooking group instead of for the whole camp — one 30-person shopping list is harder to shop and pack than three 10-person ones.
Why does the ice number change when I change the menu?
Because it is calculated from the weight of the cold items you actually chose, not from a flat per-person-per-day figure. Swap two nights of steak for pasta and there is much less to keep cold, so the ice estimate falls.
How do you make a camp duty roster that is actually fair?
Rotate by position rather than by name, and then count. If jobs shift one place at every meal, nobody repeats the same duty back-to-back. The check that matters afterwards is the count per person: if one person has five jobs and another has two, the rotation is fine but the group size does not divide evenly, and you should add or remove a job rather than reshuffle.
What jobs should be on a campout duty roster?
Four covers most groups: cook, assistant, clean-up, and fire and water. Families often need only cook and clean-up. Larger camps add a water run, a bear bag or food hang, and a tent and site check. More than about six jobs per meal and people start standing around waiting for something to do.
Someone on my roster has no jobs at all — why?
Because there are more people than duties. With four jobs per meal and eight people, half the group is off duty at any given meal, and over a short trip somebody can end up with nothing. The tool names them rather than hiding it. Either add jobs, or accept that on a two-day trip not everyone cooks.
Can I add my own recipes?
Yes — the "Add your own dish" section takes a name, a meal slot and a list of ingredients with quantities per adult portion. Your dishes are saved alongside the built-in library and behave the same way, including in the cooler plan if you mark ingredients as cold.
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