Kiwi Lunchbox Planner
Enjoy easy, healthy lunchbox recipes for your kids.
Your personalised lunch plan starts here
Tell us your family's dietary needs and we'll generate a full 5-day school lunch plan β with ingredients, estimated costs, and a printable shopping list.
- 1Set allergy filters in the left panelTap the filter icons below to set dietary needs
- 2Click Generate Plan β takes about 5 seconds
- 3Download as PDF or email yourself the shopping list
Example β what your plan looks like
Monday
Rice Paper Rolls
$3.40
Tuesday
Chicken Pesto Panini
$5.93
Wednesday
Sushi Rolls
$4.01
Thursday
Cheesymite Scrolls
$2.84
Friday
Mini Spinach Quiche
$4.94
Example β shopping list
π₯© Meat & Seafood
- Chicken breast
- Smoked salmon
π₯¦ Produce
- Cucumber
- Avocado
- Spinach leaves
- Cherry tomatoes
π§ Dairy & Eggs
- Cheddar cheese
- Eggs (Γ4)
π Bakery & Pantry
- Rice paper wrappers
- Pasta (penne)
- Nori sheets
Create Your Perfect Weekly School Lunch Plan
Kiwi Lunchbox is a free school lunch planner for New Zealand families. It builds a five-day plan from a menu set tagged for nut-free, dairy-free, gluten-free, egg-free, vegetarian and vegan diets, and prices every day against Woolworths shelf prices tracked week by week. Turn sales on and it builds the week around what is in the current Woolworths and New World mailers. Each plan comes with a shopping list and a costed total, so you know the number before you get to the checkout.
Set Dietary Filters
Select any allergy filters (nut-free, dairy-free, gluten-free, egg-free) or dietary preferences (vegetarian, vegan). You can also exclude specific ingredients your child dislikes and add fridge leftovers you'd like to use up.
Generate Your Plan
Click 'Generate Plan' and the planner assembles a five-day menu in seconds, varied across categories rather than scored for nutritional balance. Each day shows a main, snacks, the full ingredient list, the method, and the estimated cost worked out as a portion of each pack.
Download & Shop
Download your plan as a PDF, email it to yourself, or share it. The shopping list is grouped by aisle with Woolworths price estimates β ready to take to the supermarket.
Allergy-Safe Meal Planning
Every meal plan is built around your family's specific dietary requirements. Our database of 94 New Zealand-friendly recipes is tagged with detailed allergen information, ensuring that filtered meals never contain ingredients that could trigger allergies. From tree nut and peanut allergies to coeliac-friendly gluten-free options, your children's safety comes first.
Real Supermarket Prices
Prices come from Woolworths NZ's online catalogue and are refreshed once a week. Each ingredient shows its unit price and portion cost, so you can see what the week is actually worth rather than what you carry home. Pak'nSave is not priced inside the planner β for a store-by-store comparison see the the NZ Lunchbox Price Index, which tracks 20 staples and says plainly when the two columns are too far apart in time to compare. Across our full menu set the median lunchbox is about $3.80 a day, or roughly $19 for five days.
What a generated week actually looks like
The planner pulls from a library of 94 lunch recipes and 41 snacks, and builds a Monday-to-Friday plan that varies the category each day so your kid is not eating a sandwich five times in a row. Here is one real five-day plan it produced for a Year 4 child with no allergy filters set β the same output you would get on screen, just frozen here so you can see the shape of it before you generate your own.
| Day | Lunch | Type | Core ingredients |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monday | Chicken Wrap | Sandwich | Tortilla, chicken, lettuce, mayo |
| Tuesday | Sushi Rolls | Cold | Sushi rice, nori, tuna or chicken, avocado |
| Wednesday | Mac 'n Cheese (Thermos) | Hot | Macaroni, cheese sauce, milk |
| Thursday | Egg Salad Sandwich | Sandwich | Bread, boiled eggs, mayo, lettuce |
| Friday | Pizza Muffins | Baking | Flour, milk, cheese, ham, tomato paste |
Each generated lunch comes with a method (Mac 'n Cheese tells you to pack it into a pre-warmed Thermos, the wrap tells you to keep the mayo cold), so the plan is not just a list of names β it is something you can actually pack on a Tuesday morning. Click Generate again and you get a different five-day combination, because it picks fresh from the recipe pool each time.
How the allergy filters work β a worked example
The filters are not cosmetic. When you tick a filter, matching recipes are removed from the pool before the week is built, so an excluded ingredient can never slip into a generated plan. A concrete example: switch on the Nut Allergy filter and the planner drops every recipe currently flagged as containing nuts β right now that is 5 recipes:
- Chicken Pesto Panini and Pasta Salad β the pesto contains cashews
- Peanut Butter Sandwich
- Chicken Satay β the satay sauce is peanut-based
- Dairy-Free Chicken Pesto Pasta β pesto again
That leaves 89 recipes eligible, and the week is built only from those. You can stack filters too β Nut Allergy plus Dairy plus Vegetarian β and the pool shrinks accordingly. The flags come from checking each recipe's ingredient list by hand, but they are a planning aid, not a substitute for reading the actual product packaging: a brand of wrap or cheese can change its recipe, and only the on-pack PEAL allergen statement is authoritative. If your child has an anaphylactic allergy, always read the label too.
How the price estimate is calculated
Every plan comes with a rough weekly cost. The prices behind it are read weekly from Woolworths NZ's own online catalogue, and they started from a round I walked in person. On 16 May 2026 I walked the aisles at Pak'nSave Ormiston and Woolworths Ormiston in East Auckland β the two stores I actually shop at β and recorded the shelf price of 20 lunchbox staples by hand. A few of them:
| Item | Woolworths | Pak'nSave |
|---|---|---|
| Wholegrain bread (700g loaf) | $4.50 | $3.99 |
| Wraps (8-pack) | $5.00 | $4.50 |
| Bagels (4-pack) | $4.50 | $3.99 |
The planner takes each recipe's ingredient list, maps it onto this price data, and divides by how many lunches the pack covers to get a per-serve estimate. So a wrap-based lunch costs roughly the wrap (about $0.56β0.63 each from an 8-pack) plus a portion of the chicken, plus a few cents of lettuce and mayo. Add the five days together and you get the weekly figure shown under your plan. It is an estimate β your store, your region, and this week's specials will move it β but it is built on real Auckland shelf prices, not guesses. The full 20-item comparison, updated when I re-check, lives on the NZ Lunchbox Price Index.
What you get when you click Generate
One click produces the full five-day plan above, a consolidated shopping list grouped by category (so you are not zig-zagging across the supermarket), a per-recipe method, and the weekly cost estimate. You can download the whole thing as a PDF to stick on the fridge or send to a partner, and if you create a free account you can save favourite lunches so they show up more often. No sign-up is required just to generate and download β the account only exists for saving and syncing across devices.