A No-Cook Week for the August Heat, Under CHF 60

A no-cook week means seven cold dinners built entirely from the fridge and the store cupboard — salads, tinned-fish bowls, cold soups, cheese-and-charcuterie plates — with no stove, no oven and no heat in the kitchen. Built from discounter basics, it feeds two people for around CHF 51 across the week, comfortably under CHF 60.

That is more than a heatwave comfort. Swapping a week of chilled supermarket ready-meals — easily CHF 6–8 each, or roughly CHF 90 for two across seven dinners — for this plan keeps about CHF 40 in your pocket, and it does it without turning a small flat into a sauna at 32°C.

Can you really eat dinner for a week without cooking?

Yes — the trick is to stop thinking of dinner as a hot plate and start treating it as an assembly job. A no-cook dinner leans on foods that are already edible straight from the packet: tinned pulses and fish, cheese, cured meat, yoghurt, bread, and whatever salad vegetables are cheapest that week. In August, Swiss tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers sit at their annual price floor, which is exactly why a cold-food week is cheapest now rather than in February.

No stove also means no oven and no hob heating a small flat during a hot spell. Swiss city summers now push past 30°C for days at a time, and the last thing a top-floor flat needs at 7pm is a 220°C oven running for an hour. Cold dinners solve the budget and the room temperature in a single move.

The 7-day no-cook dinner plan for two

Here is a full week of cold dinners, each one sized for two people and made with nothing more than a knife, a board, a bowl and the fridge. Prices are discounter-level — Aldi Suisse and Lidl own-brands — rounded, and assume you already keep basics like olive oil, salt and mustard.

What the week costs, and what it saves

At roughly CHF 51 for two, the plan works out near CHF 3.60 per portion — a fraction of the CHF 18 you would hand over for a chilled take-away salad at lunch, and well below a fridge shelf of ready-meals. It is also a modest slice of the average household food budget, which the Federal Statistical Office puts at around CHF 636 a month for food and non-alcoholic drinks.

Buying to a plan does something the headline number hides: it cuts waste. Swiss households bin roughly 119 kg of food per person every year — about 38% of the country's food waste — and unplanned fresh vegetables are a large part of that. A no-cook week that lists exactly what each dinner needs means the cucumber gets eaten on Wednesday instead of liquefying in the drawer by Sunday.

Which no-cook proteins are cheapest?

Protein is where a cold dinner is won or lost on price. Tinned pulses are unbeatable: a tin of chickpeas or white beans costs under CHF 1 at Aldi or Lidl and is ready to eat straight from the drainer. Tinned tuna and sardines come next, then own-brand cottage cheese (Hüttenkäse) and feta. Ready-to-eat tofu is a solid vegetarian swap.

Cured meats — Trockenfleisch, cervelat, sliced ham — and smoked fish look like more effort than they are, but they cost several francs more per portion, so let them anchor one or two dinners rather than all seven. Repeated K-Tipp basket tests put Aldi and Lidl around 12% cheaper than Migros on exactly these tinned and chilled staples, which is why the plan above assumes discounter own-brands.

Are no-cook dinners filling enough?

The usual complaint about cold food is that it does not stick. That is a construction problem, not a temperature one. A plate of leaves will have you raiding the cupboard by nine; the same leaves with a tin of beans, a slice of bread and a spoonful of olive oil will not.

Build every dinner on three legs — a protein, a slow carbohydrate and some fat — and a cold plate is every bit as satisfying as a hot one.

How to shop a no-cook week in one trip

The plan only saves money if the shop is disciplined. Four steps keep it to one trip and one receipt:

1. Plan the seven dinners first, then write the list from them — not the other way round. The table above is your template; copy it and adjust for what your household actually eats.
2. Buy tins and dairy by the lowest Grundpreis (the unit price on the shelf label), not the lowest sticker. The bigger tub of cottage cheese or the four-pack of tuna is almost always cheaper per 100 g.
3. Do the fresh vegetables last and buy only what the plan names. August tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers are at their cheapest, so lean the week on them and skip anything that will not get used.
4. Add two buffer items — an extra loaf and an extra tin — so a night when nobody wants to assemble anything still has a fallback that is not delivery.

For cold mains that scale up for guests, see our 10 summer salads under CHF 3 per portion, and for more heatwave-proof ideas there is our guide to no-cook dinners for Swiss heat waves.

Beat the heat without touching the oven

The whole point of a no-cook week is that the kitchen stays at room temperature. That saves more than your sanity: an electric oven draws 2–3 kW and dumps most of that heat straight into the room, where it then fights your fan. Skipping it for a week is a small but real trim to the electricity bill on top of the grocery saving. Our guide to cooking without heating the flat goes deeper on the energy side — a no-cook week is simply the most extreme, and most effective, version of it.

Let Eini's algorithm build your no-cook week

Assembling seven cold dinners, scaling them to your household and pricing the list across every chain is exactly the legwork Eini takes off your plate. Meal planning and groceries are live in the app today: tell the algorithm you want a week of no-cook dinners and it builds the plan, generates one shopping list, and shows the cheapest place to buy each item across Coop, Migros, Lidl, Aldi, Denner and Aligro. Eini is free to download, with an optional premium subscription at CHF 1.00 per week for the full planner. The plan in this article is one week; the app turns it into a habit.