A Veganuary meal plan for January 2027: four weeks of menus, a cupboard list and Sunday batch cooking

In short

• January 2027 has four full weeks: 4 to 10, 11 to 17, 18 to 24 and 25 to 31. Your batch cooking Sundays are 3, 10, 17, 24 and, if you are carrying on, the 31st.
• The NHS says adults need about 1.5 micrograms of vitamin B12 a day, that it is not found naturally in plant foods, and that vegans may need fortified foods or a supplement.
• Everyone in the UK, vegan or not, is advised by the NHS to consider 10 micrograms of vitamin D a day during autumn and winter. If you take one in January, check that it is suitable for vegans.
• An adult needs about 700 mg of calcium a day, according to the British Dietetic Association. Calcium-set tofu, fortified unsweetened plant drinks, tahini and UK bread, which is fortified, all count.
• Veganuary started with its first pledge in January 2014, on a kitchen table in Yorkshire. Scotland gets an extra bank holiday on Monday 4 January 2027, which is a good day for the first batch cook north of the border.

What Veganuary is, and what it is not

Veganuary is a charity campaign that asks people to try eating vegan for the 31 days of January: no meat, fish, dairy, eggs or honey, and no animal-derived ingredients hidden in things like stock, pastry or sweets. You can sign up on the charity’s site for daily emails and recipes, but nobody checks, and nobody is going to come round if you have milk in your tea on the 9th.

It is not a diet in the weight-loss sense, and we will not promise you anything on the scales or in a blood test. A vegan January can be full of vegetables and pulses or it can be chips and vegan sausage rolls; both are vegan. What it reliably does is make you cook differently for a month, which is why a plan matters more here than in almost any other month.

Before 1 January: the last week of December

The week between Christmas and New Year is your preparation week, and it has two jobs. The first is to deal with what is already in the fridge. Christmas leftovers keep two days in the fridge under the Food Standards Agency’s rule, so whatever turkey, ham, cheese and cream is still there on the 29th either gets eaten, frozen for February, or handed to someone who is not doing Veganuary. Our Christmas dinner timings go into the Boxing Day side of this in more detail.

The second job is the big cupboard shop. New Year’s Day is a bank holiday everywhere in the UK, and plenty of shops run reduced hours around it, so do the stock-up on Tuesday 29 or Wednesday 30 December. Write down the five dinners you will eat in the first week before you go, then buy for those plus the cupboard list further down, not for an imaginary month.

If you live with people who are not taking part, have the conversation now rather than on the 4th. Agree which dinners will be shared, which ones get a meat or cheese topping on the side, and who is cooking when.

The month at a glance

Each week has one idea, so you are learning one thing at a time instead of twenty. The first week is about making dishes you already know with the meat taken out. The second introduces tofu, properly pressed and baked. The third goes to the cuisines where vegan food is simply normal. The last week brings Burns Night, and then repeats your favourites, because the dishes you cook a second time are the ones you will still be making in March.

Week 1, dinner by dinner

In practice, one week looks like this for two adults with lunch the next day built in. The rule is simple: every dinner cooked on Sunday is made in double, so the second portion becomes either Wednesday’s dinner or someone’s lunch box.

The Veganuary shopping list: stock the cupboard once

Most of a vegan kitchen is shelf-stable, which is good news in the first week of January. Buy the base list once in late December, then each week only buy the fresh things and whatever the recipes need specially. Check labels for fortified versions of plant drinks, yoghurts, cereals and yeast extract, because that is where most of your B12 and calcium will come from.

Where the protein comes from

The NHS advice for vegans is short: include beans, pulses and other proteins. The British Dietetic Association adds that lentils, beans, chickpeas, seeds, nuts, nut butters, tofu and tempeh all make meeting protein needs straightforward, and it warns that meat substitutes are often high in salt and fat, so they are best used in moderation. In plan terms, that means every dinner in the four weeks above is built on a pulse or on tofu, and the vegan sausages are a Saturday treat, not the backbone.

For a sense of scale, Health Canada’s nutrient file puts boiled lentils at 9.0 g of protein per 100 g, which is why a lentil ragù made with a whole 500 g bag is so filling. You do not need to combine particular foods at every meal; you need variety across the day. If you like to see the numbers, Olivi shows the protein per serving under each recipe, calculated from an official nutrient database rather than guessed.

Breakfast and lunch are where Veganuary protein quietly goes missing. Porridge made with fortified soya drink and a spoon of peanut butter, beans on toast, hummus with everything, and the second portion of last night’s dinner fix most of that without any special shopping.

B12, vitamin D, calcium and the other nutrients to plan for

The NHS lists the nutrients that are harder to get on a vegan diet without planning: calcium, iron, vitamin B12, iodine and selenium, along with omega-3 fats and vitamin D. A month is short, and nothing below is medical advice, but building these foods into your shopping list from day one is far easier than trying to catch up in week three. If you are pregnant, breastfeeding, planning a vegan January for a child, or managing a health condition, talk to your GP or a registered health professional first.

Veganuary as a family, when not everyone is joining in

The most common Veganuary set-up is not a fully vegan household. It is one or two people trying it while a partner, the children or a flatmate carry on as normal. Cooking two dinners every night is how that ends in week two. Cook one base and finish it two ways instead: the chilli is vegan, and grated cheese sits on the table; the curry is vegan, and someone adds leftover chicken to their own bowl; the pasta sauce is lentil ragù, and the meatballs are a side for those who want them.

Children tend to accept familiar shapes more readily than new ingredients, so the week 1 dishes (shepherd’s pie, spag bol, burgers and chips) go down far better than a bowl of something with tempeh in the name. The NHS points out that a vegan child needs plenty of different foods for the energy that growing takes, so if a child is doing the whole month, plan their meals with the same care as yours and ask your GP or health visitor if in doubt. Packed lunches are easiest with wraps, hummus, falafel, pasta salads and the leftover curry in a flask.

For more ideas that work for everyone, our family meal plan has a week of dinners for four, and many of them become vegan with a single swap.

The Sunday batch cook, step by step

Two hours on a Sunday afternoon is what makes the weeknights easy. The order matters more than the recipes: start whatever takes longest, use the oven and the hob at the same time, and finish with the jobs that need no heat. This is the session for Sunday 3 January, which feeds week 1.

• 4.00pm. Oven on to 200°C (180°C fan, gas 6). Peel and chop 1.5 kg of root vegetables onto two trays with oil, salt and thyme, and roast for 45 minutes.
• 4.10pm. In the biggest pan, soften two onions, two carrots and two celery sticks, then add a 500 g bag of green lentils (or four tins, drained), two tins of chopped tomatoes, passata, stock and herbs. Simmer for 40 minutes.
• 4.20pm. In a second pan, start the chickpea curry: onion, garlic, ginger, curry paste, two tins of chickpeas, a tin of coconut milk and a tin of tomatoes. Simmer gently for 25 minutes and stir in the spinach at the end.
• 4.45pm. Rice on. While it cooks, make a jar of tahini dressing and a jar of overnight oats with fortified soya drink for the next three mornings.
• 5.00pm. Roots out. Curry off the heat, cooled in a wide dish.
• 5.15pm. Ragù done. Half goes into a dish for Wednesday’s shepherd’s pie, the other half into boxes for Monday and lunches.
• 5.30pm. Everything cooled for no more than one to two hours, as the FSA advises, then labelled and into the fridge or freezer. Anything you will not eat within two days goes in the freezer.

How to plan Veganuary in Olivi

Tick Vegan in your dietary preferences on 1 January and Olive, Olivi’s virtual cooking coach, only suggests vegan recipes from then on; untick it on 1 February if the month was an experiment. Allergies go in the same place and are treated as a strict exclusion. Then ask Olive something like “a vegan week of dinners for two, with leftovers for lunch, mostly lentils and beans, one tofu dish”, and add what she suggests to your plan, day by day. If you are doing Veganuary alone in a mixed household, tell her in the chat and she can suggest dishes that take a meat or cheese topping on the side.

Add the cupboard staples you bought in December to the pantry and they stay off the weekly shopping list, which is generated from your plan and sorted by aisle. Share it with whoever does the shop. On Sunday, a batch cooking session turns the week’s recipes into one timed sequence, and the portions you freeze land in My freezer, so the spare ragù turns up again in week three instead of in March.

The recipes you find on social media during January can come straight into your library too: our guide to saving recipes from TikTok shows how. For vegetarian dishes that become vegan with one change, browse our easy vegetarian recipes, and if January follows a December of baking, the homemade mince pies page has a vegan version of the last pies of the season.