Planning Camp Menus and Shopping Lists

Feeding a camp is a logistics job in its own right — how many sausages for forty hungry Scouts, who needs the gluten-free option, and how much will the whole shop come to. The Camp menu planner turns that into a single, repeatable workflow: plan your meals on a grid, let Scoutworks build the shopping list, and check the menu against the dietary needs of the people who've actually said they're coming.

It does two things a spreadsheet never could. It checks every meal against your attendees' real medical and dietary information, naming who is affected. And it prices the shop using UK average grocery prices that refresh every month, so your estimate stays close to what you'll spend at the till.

Where to find it#

In the left sidebar, click Tools, then open the Camp menu planner card. The planner is visible to leaders and group admins.

The hub page has four tabs: Camps lists your camp menus, Recipes and Ingredients hold the shared library plus anything you add yourself, and Templates holds camps you've saved to reuse. From the Camps tab, click any menu to open its workspace, or use New camp menu to start one.

Creating a camp menu#

A three-step wizard sets up a new menu. You have two starting points:

When you link a menu to an event, Scoutworks reads the RSVPs to fill in your numbers: young people from member RSVPs, and adults from the leaders and parent helpers who've accepted. You get a starting headcount without counting heads.

Adjusting headcounts per day#

People arrive late and leave early, so numbers rarely stay flat across a weekend. On the Plan tab, each day's header shows its headcount — click it to set adults and young people for that day individually.

If you change a day by hand, Scoutworks marks it as edited and protects it. Later, when RSVPs change, choose Sync headcounts from RSVPs from the Camp Actions menu (it appears only when the menu is linked to an event): only the days you haven't touched get refreshed — your manual edits are always kept.

The ingredient and recipe library#

Scoutworks ships with a ready-made library so you're not starting from a blank page: 130+ everyday UK ingredients and 32 classic camp recipes, from a full cooked breakfast to chilli con carne.

Library items are shared and read-only — you can use them freely, but you can't edit the originals. To make something your own, you have two routes:

• Set your own price. On any ingredient, enter the price you actually pay locally. Your price always wins over the average price Scoutworks holds.
• Duplicate a recipe. Copy a library recipe into your group, then change the ingredients, quantities, or method however you like.

You can also add your own ingredients and recipes from scratch — they sit alongside the library and are fully editable.

Planning the meals#

The Plan tab is a grid: meal slots down the side (breakfast, lunch, dinner, supper, snack) and days across the top. On a phone, each day collapses into its own section so you can plan on the move.

To add a meal, pick a slot on a day and choose a recipe. For each meal line you can set:

Because each line carries its own portion count, you can plan the main dish for everyone and a smaller batch of an alternative on the same slot, side by side.

Daily essentials#

Some things get used every day regardless of what's on the menu — tea, coffee, squash. On the Essentials tab you set a quantity per person per day, then a percentage to reflect how many people actually have it. Two cups of tea a day at 50% take, for example, sizes the brew for a camp where only half the group drinks it.

Generating the shopping list#

Once your meals are in, open the Shopping tab and generate it. Scoutworks adds up everything every meal and essential needs, rounds each ingredient up to whole packs, groups them by supermarket aisle, and prices the lot.

You're not locked to what was generated. You can:

• Tick items off as you go round the shop — built to work on a phone, even with patchy signal at the supermarket.
• Add your own items that aren't tied to a recipe (firelighters, bin bags, foil).
• Override the pack count or add a note to any line.

When you change the plan after generating the list, a Update list banner appears at the top. Regenerating is safe: it keeps your ticks, your notes, your pack overrides, and any items you added by hand. It never silently throws your work away — and it never regenerates on its own.

Checking dietary needs#

This is the safety-critical part. The Dietary tab reads the medical and dietary information recorded against the members who've RSVP'd, and checks it against the meals you've planned.

For each meal, it names the attendees a dish could affect — so you can see at a glance that, say, the satay has two young people with a nut allergy coming. It also counts how many attendees need each kind of variant, to help you decide how many alternative portions to plan.

A standalone menu that isn't linked to an event has no attendee list to check against, so the Dietary tab stays empty until you link it to a camp.

Costs and budget#

The Costs tab turns the shopping list into the numbers you'll be asked about:

• Estimated total, plus cost per head and cost per young person.
• Your budget and the difference, so you can see if you're over or under before you shop.
• A box to record what you actually spent afterwards, for next year's planning.
• A count of any items with no price, so nothing's quietly missing from the total.

Prices come from official UK average grocery prices published by the Office for National Statistics, refreshed every month, so the costing line tells you which month it's based on. Wherever you've set your own price for an ingredient, that's the one used.

Templates, printing, and export#

Once you've planned a camp you like, Save as template stores the meals and daily essentials (without the dates, headcounts, or shopping list) so you can spin up next term's camp in seconds with Create from template.

When it's time to cook, you can print:

You can also export the shopping list as a CSV to open in a spreadsheet. Each print and the CSV export stays greyed out until the data behind it exists — add meals before printing the camp menu or chef's sheet, and generate the shopping list before printing or exporting it.

What's next#

• Kit Lists for Camps and Activities — the "what to bring" side of camp prep, with parent checklists.
• Creating Events — set up the camp you want to link your menu to.
• Medical Information and Dietary Requirements — how member dietary needs are recorded, which is what the dietary check reads from.