Meal replacement powders can be cost competitive in single households

Meal replacement powders are known to be rather pricy in comparison to cooking your own meals.

Yet for single households it is actually price competitive to the alternative if you factor in the time needed for shopping food and preparing meals and cleaning dishes etc.

Here is a quick rundown on the math:

One bag of meal replacement powder is roughly 4000 kcal, this is equavalent to 2 days worth of food, considering it is mixed with water instead of milk.

So one month is about 15 bags.

One bag is roughly 14€.

This leaves you with food costs of 210€.

For my eating regimen I have chosen the vanilla variant of drinking 3 shakes a day. 

I considered a prep time of 1 minute, about 2 minutes of drinking and cleaning afterwards so about 10 minutes of time wasted on "eating".

Resulting in 5 hours spent on food per month.

Furthermore I assumed a wage of about 10€ per hour -not far away from the minimum wage in most first world countries.

This means 50€ worth of time is used up in this scenario.

So total cost: ~260€ a month.

Cooking for yourself I assumed the ingredients to be worth 100€ (cheap, but possible).

For Breakfast and Dinner I estimated prep and eating time to be 10 minutes each.

Lunch I assumed 40 minutes for everything.

Leaving you with about 60 minutes for cooking, eating etc. everyday.

Furthermore I assumed 1 hour of buying your ingredients per week.

Leaving you at about 34 hours of work associated with food or 340€.

Total costs should be around 440€ for the cooking route.

So theoretically you could save about 180€ by buying meal replacement powders instead of cooking.

Time benefit is about 29 hours for the meal replacement route, which is more than an extra day per month or 14 additional days per year, not too bad!

A few notes:

Meal replacement shakes can be bought even cheaper via subscription. Additionally preparing them with (plant based) milk could further decrease costs under certain circumstances.

Also meal replacement powders of course won't allow for developing cooking skills among many other deficits.

Nevertheless it is interesting to see how much cheaper the meal replacement option is, once time is considered as a ressource.

See also my other blog entry regarding meal replacement powders for further reading:

https://angelo-sasso.blogspot.com/2019/12/on-meal-replacement-powders.html