Cheap work lunch ideas: 16 that survive until 1pm

What are the cheapest work lunches?

A grain salad with tinned pulses at about $1.80, a frittata slice at about $1.50, and leftovers from the previous night's dinner at close to nothing extra. Those 3 cover most of the week without any separate cooking.

Leftovers are the cheapest lunch there is and the most often wasted. Cooking 6 portions of a dinner that serves 4 costs almost nothing extra and produces 2 lunches, which is the single highest-value habit on this page. The trick is portioning them into a container while serving dinner rather than after eating it, because the second version rarely happens.

What a week of each costs

The comparison is worth seeing in full, because the difference is larger than most people assume and it compounds over a year.

Even the middle option saves over $1,000 a year, which is the part worth holding onto when a packed lunch feels like an effort on a Sunday evening.

The 5 rules of a lunch that travels

Every failed packed lunch breaks one of these. None of them costs anything to follow.

1. 1Dress at the desk. Dressing on leaves at 8am means wilted leaves at 1pm. A small pot solves it permanently.
2. 2Put wet things at the bottom. Tomatoes, cucumber and dressing under the grains, leaves on top, so nothing sits in liquid.
3. 3Choose grains over leaves. Couscous, rice, pasta and bulgur improve after hours in a container. Salad leaves only degrade.
4. 4Season more than feels right. Cold food tastes flatter than hot food, so anything eaten at room temperature needs extra salt, acid and chilli.
5. 5Assume one reheat only. Reheating twice is a food-safety issue and always ruins the texture, so portion for a single go.

Six lunches with no microwave

Most offices have one and there is usually a queue. These 6 are designed to be eaten cold or at room temperature, and each is better for it.

• Couscous and chickpea salad. Couscous soaked in hot water the night before, chickpeas, lemon, olive oil, parsley. Improves overnight.
• Frittata slice. Six eggs, a potato, an onion and whatever vegetable needs using, baked and cut into 4. Excellent cold.
• Peanut noodle jar. Cooked noodles, shredded carrot and cabbage, with peanut sauce in a separate pot.
• Lentil soup in a flask. A flask filled with boiling soup at 8am is still hot at 1pm and needs no kitchen at all.
• Egg and potato salad. Boiled new potatoes, hard-boiled eggs, capers and mustard dressing added at the desk.
• Tuna pasta salad. Cooked pasta, a tin of tuna, sweetcorn, and dressing kept separate.

Five lunches for a microwave

If there is a microwave and no queue, the options widen to anything that was dinner. These 5 reheat without turning into a different dish.

• Chilli with rice. Better on day 2 than day 1, and the rice absorbs the sauce overnight rather than drying out.
• Dal. Add a tablespoon of water before reheating, because it thickens considerably in the fridge.
• Chickpea curry. Coconut-based sauces reheat more reliably than cream ones, which split.
• Pasta bake. The one pasta dish that reheats properly, because the sauce and cheese protect it.
• Soup. Two minutes in a microwave, and the only lunch on this list that improves if you forget about it until 2pm.

What does not reheat is anything fried, anything with a crisp coating, and plain pasta in a sauce that was thin to begin with. Those are lunches to eat cold or not to pack.

A 30-minute Sunday that covers 5 days

Batching lunch works when it is a single short session rather than a daily task. This sequence produces 5 lunches and uses one pan, one tray and a kettle.

1. 1Put the oven on and make a frittata. Six eggs, a boiled potato, an onion, 25 minutes. Cut into 4 once cool.
2. 2Boil the kettle for couscous. Two hundred grams covered with hot water and left with a lid on, then forgotten about for 10 minutes.
3. 3Open 2 tins while that sits. Chickpeas into the couscous, tuna kept aside for a pasta salad.
4. 4Boil pasta and eggs in the same water. Eggs for the potato salad, pasta for the tuna salad.
5. 5Portion into 5 containers with 3 small dressing pots. Total time about 30 minutes including washing up.

The cost of that session is roughly $10 for 5 lunches. The alternative is about $50 and 5 queues. Doing it while something else is already in the oven makes it feel like no extra work at all, which is the only version of this habit that survives past the second week.

How do you make it a habit?

Cook once for lunches rather than daily. Sunday evening producing 3 portions of a grain salad and a frittata covers 5 days, and the whole job is about 30 minutes including washing up.

The batching side is covered in batch cook for the week and meal prep on a budget. If lunch is coming from dinner, the portioning logic in cheap dinners under $20 applies directly.

For a version of this with a protein target, high-protein meal prep covers the numbers. On keeping a lunch rotation somewhere you will actually look, ReciBites vs Mealime and ReciBites vs Copy Me That are the closest comparisons.