I’ve always said the waste in cooking for one isn’t leftovers, it’s packs. So I stopped guessing and counted. Solo Supper has 456 dinners for one, and the planner already knows how each fresh ingredient is sold in a typical UK supermarket: a 30g pack of coriander, a bunch of eight spring onions, a 500g pack of mince. Put the two together and you can see exactly what each dinner leaves behind.
How much of a pack does one dinner for one leave over?
About two thirds. Across 456 dinners, the fresh packs a recipe opens are, on average, 66% unused when you’ve finished cooking. Nine in ten dinners (414 of the 456) leave at least half a pack of something that goes off within a few days.
That isn’t the recipes being greedy. It’s what happens when the pack is sized for a family and the dinner is sized for you.
Which packs get left the most?
The worst offenders, among ingredients used in at least eight recipes:
| Ingredient | How it’s sold | Left after one dinner |
|---|---|---|
| Milk | 1 litre | 93% |
| Natural yoghurt | 500g pot | 91% |
| Spring onions | bunch of 8 | 86% |
| Soured cream | 150ml pot | 84% |
| Mint | 30g pack | 83% |
| Beansprouts | 300g bag | 83% |
| Coriander | 30g pack | 82% |
| Parsley | 30g pack | 81% |
| Chives | 20g pack | 81% |
| Double cream | 300ml pot | 80% |
| Feta | 200g block | 78% |
| Pork mince | 500g pack | 74% |
Herbs are the big one, because they turn up everywhere: coriander is in 80 of the dinners and parsley in 69, and each one uses a pinch of a pack that’s slime in four days. Spring onions are in 66. (What to do with the rest: coriander, parsley, spring onions, soured cream, yoghurt.)
Does planning the week actually help?
Yes, a lot. I compared two ways of choosing seven dinners, a thousand times each. One: seven dinners picked at random from the site, the way most of us shop, whatever looks good. Two: seven dinners planned around the packs, starting from the same first dinner and then choosing each next dinner to use up what the week has already opened.
| Random week | Planned week | |
|---|---|---|
| Fresh packs bought | 12.4 | 4.5 |
| Different fresh things in the fridge | 12.1 | 3.2 |
| Packs’ worth left at the end of the week | 7.3 | 0.5 |
The random week ends with about seven packs’ worth of fresh food left over. The planned week ends with about half a pack. Same number of dinners, about a third of the shopping, and almost nothing for the bin.
Some of that comes from the planned week sharing packs (the coriander bought on Monday goes into Wednesday and Friday too), and some from leaning on dinners that need fewer fresh things in the first place. Both count: the fridge doesn’t care why it’s empty.
What does that mean for your week?
Three things I’d take from it. Plan the pack, not the dinner: when a recipe opens something perishable, give the rest a job later in the week before you shop. Watch the herbs and the pots: if you’re buying coriander, spring onions or soured cream, line up two more dinners that want them. And fewer fresh things, more often: a week built on three or four fresh ingredients is easier to finish than one built on twelve.
Every Solo Supper recipe ends with “Use up the rest”, the dinners that finish what it leaves over, and the free planner adds them to your week. Pro picks the whole week for you, choosing dinners that share their packs. If you want a ready-made example, here’s a costed week of seven dinners for about £16.
How I worked it out
Each recipe’s fresh ingredients are rounded up to whole supermarket packs, using the same pack sizes as the planner’s shopping list. “Left over” is the part of those packs the recipe doesn’t use. Only ingredients that go off within a few days of opening are counted; things that keep, like rice, tins and spices, aren’t. It assumes nothing else in the week uses the rest, which is roughly true if you’re cooking dinners at random, and it’s a model rather than a weigh-in of real bins. The planned weeks use a simpler version of what the planner does. Pack sizes are typical for UK supermarkets in 2026 and vary by shop.
Neil