IS A MEAL PLAN CHEAPER THAN COOKING?

The short answer: cooking at home is cheaper on money. Around AED 11 a meal against AED 30 to 45 on a meal plan and AED 56 on a delivery app. That is not close and we are not going to pretend it is.

The question is whether you have the hours. Because when you add up a normal Dubai weekday, there are not many left, and that is why most people end up ordering in anyway.

Here is the full working, money first, then time.

What we compared

One person, two meals a day, 20 days. That is 40 meals, which is how most UAE meal plans are sold.

1. Cook it yourself. Groceries from a normal supermarket.
2. A meal plan. Delivered, portioned, calorie counted.
3. Delivery apps. Talabat, Deliveroo, Careem, Noon.

Option 1: cooking at home

Two ways to price this. The theoretical basket, and what people actually spend.

The theoretical basket

One person, two desi meals a day for 20 days, at Dubai supermarket averages.

That is AED 11 a meal, on paper, if you buy nothing extra and waste nothing.

What single people in Dubai actually spend

Reported grocery spend for one person in Dubai runs AED 200 to AED 460 a week, which is AED 800 to over AED 2,000 a month. It depends almost entirely on where you shop and how much convenience you buy.

Divide that by roughly 90 meals a month and you get the real cost of a home cooked meal.

The theoretical basket lands in the budget tier, which is the honest place for it. It assumes you shop at Viva or the basics aisle at Carrefour and LuLu, and that nothing goes in the bin.

Two things push people out of that tier without them noticing. Vegetables have got more expensive, and fresh produce is now one of the biggest lines in a weekly shop rather than the cheap filler it used to be. And grocery delivery fees, impulse buys and imported items inflate a weekly bill by 30 to 50 percent. A basket that should cost AED 200 becomes AED 300 without a single planned purchase.

Option 2: a meal plan

Meal plans in the UAE run roughly AED 40 to 95 a day depending on the provider and how many meals you take.

Our own prices, since we can publish those. Every block below is two meals a day for 20 days, which is 40 meals.

The Value Plan at AED 30 a meal is the cheapest food we sell, and it is already our lowest price, so it does not get discounted further. On the Weight Loss plans the Savings for Days offer takes AED 180 off the block, which is AED 45 a meal down to AED 40.50.

Delivery is included. No shopping, no prep, no washing up, and nothing goes off in the fridge. You can pay by card, or split the cost with tabby over several payments with no interest.

Option 3: delivery apps

A cheap restaurant meal in Dubai averages around AED 46. Add delivery and service fees and you are at roughly AED 56 a meal, more if you are under the free delivery threshold.

40 meals on the apps: about AED 2,240.

And that is food nobody weighed, cooked in oil you cannot see, in a portion decided by a kitchen trying to make you happy rather than keep you at 400 calories.

The three side by side

Per meal, like for like.

Cooking still wins on money, but look at how much the gap depends on how you shop. Against a budget shopper a meal plan is around three times the price. Against someone buying imported produce and branded convenience food, our Value Plan is about a third more.

And every one of those home cooking numbers assumes you cook. Which brings us to the part that actually decides this.

Where do the hours in your day actually go?

Here is a normal Dubai weekday. Not a bad one. A normal one.

The commute figure is not made up. The average one way commute in Dubai is about 36 minutes, which is 72 minutes a day before you have done anything.

Now add cooking. Two proper meals a day, with prep, actual cooking and washing up, is 60 to 90 minutes. Add the weekly shop and the planning and it is more.

Cooking two meals a day does not fit into your spare time. It is your spare time.

That is the whole thing. Not laziness, not lack of discipline. There is one free hour and forty eight minutes in a weekday, and cooking wants all of it, every day, forever.

So people cook on Sunday, and Monday, and maybe Tuesday. Then Wednesday there is a late meeting, Thursday someone wants to go out, and by Friday the app is open. That is not a character flaw. That is arithmetic.

So what is home cooking really costing you?

Cooking two meals a day is about 20 hours a month once you count shopping, prep and cleaning up.

So here is the hourly rate at which a meal plan stops being more expensive than cooking. Below the number, cooking is cheaper. Above it, the plan is.

Read that bottom row again. If you buy imported produce and branded convenience food, our Value Plan is cheaper in real terms the moment your time is worth more than AED 11 an hour.

Even in the middle tier, the Weight Loss plan on offer breaks even at AED 48 an hour, and the Value Plan at AED 27.

Work out your own number. Monthly salary divided by about 170 gets you close — so AED 48 an hour is roughly AED 8,200 a month, and AED 27 an hour is about AED 4,600.

That is the real argument for a meal plan. Not the price on its own, but where it sits against your own time.

Three other things that move the maths

Food waste. Roughly a fifth to a third of what households buy gets thrown out. So your AED 437 basket is really AED 550 to 660 of food for AED 437 of eating.

The four out of seven problem. The home cooking number assumes you cook every single day. Most people manage four and order the rest. Three delivery meals a week is around AED 672 a month on top of your groceries, which puts you past a meal plan without ever deciding to.

Whether the calories are counted. This one has nothing to do with money. Home cooking is only as accurate as your scale and your discipline. A meal plan hands you the number. If your goal is fat loss, an uncounted cheap meal is not cheaper. It is just cheaper.

If you would rather cook and count it properly, we have written the plan out: a six day Indian diet plan at 1,500 calories with weighed portions, and the portion numbers behind it in our guide to calories in Indian food.

So who should cook, and who should not?

Cook at home if: you enjoy it, you have the hours, you are feeding a family so the per head cost drops sharply, or money is genuinely tight. Buy a kitchen scale and weigh things for two weeks.

Get a meal plan if: you work long hours, you commute, you have tried and failed to cook consistently, you are chasing a specific calorie or protein target, or you are already spending AED 1,500 a month on delivery apps. In that last case a meal plan is not an expense. It is a saving.

Use delivery apps if: it is a treat or you are stuck. As a daily habit it is the most expensive and least controlled way to eat in this city.

How we keep our number where it is

This is the only section on this page with CurryFit specifics in it.

A meal plan is only worth AED 30 to 45 a meal if the food is better than what you would cook. So, plainly, what we do:

Olive oil, sometimes coconut oil. Nothing else. No vanaspati, no refined seed oil blends, no reused oil.

No refined sugar anywhere, including the desserts.

Lighter gravies. Restaurant gravies get their body from cream and a cashew paste. Ours do not. That one difference is worth 100 to 200 calories on a plate.

A real clay lined tandoor, not an oven pretending to be one.

Cooked daily. Nothing frozen, nothing reheated from last week's batch.

Locally sourced vegetables and meat.

Sustainable packaging, because food being better for you should not mean a bin full of plastic.

Gluten free and dairy free available as add ons.

Bowls are 400g with 100 to 120g of protein in them, every meal carries its own numbers, and delivery is free across Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Sharjah and Ajman.

Frequently asked questions