How Much Does Eating Vegan Cost Per Week?

By the Caullie team · Published July 19, 2026 · Prices checked at walmart.com, July 2026

A basic vegan grocery list of whole foods — beans, rice, tofu, and vegetables you cook yourself, not packaged meat or dairy substitutes — runs about $43 to $44 a week for one adult. The full itemized list is below: dry lentils and beans, tofu, rice, oats, and produce, with no branded meat or dairy substitutes. For comparison, the USDA publishes its own bare-bones grocery budget called the Thrifty Food Plan, the government's estimate of the least a person can spend in a week and still eat a nutritionally adequate diet. For a single woman aged 20 to 50, the Thrifty Food Plan comes to $56.90 a week before a standard one-person-household adjustment, or about $68 after it. For a single man, it's $71.40 before the adjustment and about $86 after. The comparison isn't exact, since the Thrifty Food Plan is a broad government standard rather than a specific grocery list — but it shows this whole-food vegan week costs less than even the USDA's own low-cost benchmark. A moderate week with more protein variety runs closer to $65–70. Add mock meats, vegan cheese, and specialty milk, and a week can climb to $85–100+.

The $43.44 total below comes from a real, itemized Walmart list, priced item by item. The rest of this article walks through what's in that cart, explains why people think vegan food is expensive, looks at what two well-designed studies found when they compared vegan grocery spending to typical diets, and shows how to keep your own week closer to $43 than $85. There's also a free 7-day plan linked further down, no signup required, if you'd rather have the shopping already mapped out.

What a whole-food vegan week actually costs

This is a real, itemized grocery list for one adult for one week, priced at Walmart and checked July 2026. It uses store-brand items (Great Value) where they exist, the same approach our own high-protein vegan meal plan uses — most of these prices come straight from that list. Pantry staples like salt, pepper, cumin, chili powder, garlic and onion powder, and soy sauce are assumed to be already on hand, so they aren't priced here.

Most of these prices are verified, live-checked Walmart figures reused from Caullie's own published meal-plan articles. The ~ items — dry pinto beans, sandwich bread, and bananas — are estimates pulled from search listings instead of a confirmed product page, so treat them as close approximations. Package sizes matter too: staples like the rice, oats, peanut butter, vegetable oil, onions, potatoes, and soy milk come in quantities that last well past one week, so $43.44 is a conservative, high-end estimate for week one specifically. A second week built from the same pantry costs meaningfully less, since you won't be rebuying the bulk items. Prices vary by store, region, and date, so check at purchase.

What $43 a week actually feeds you

That list adds up to a lot of food and protein for the price. A half-block of the extra-firm tofu has about 285 calories and 34 g of protein. A cooked cup of the lentils has about 230 calories and 18 g of protein. A cup of the canned black beans adds roughly 218 calories and 14.5 g of protein. The oats add about 152 calories per half-cup dry. The peanut butter adds about 191 calories and 7 g of protein per two tablespoons. A cup of the rice has about 205 calories. And the soy milk has about 7 g of protein per cup — more protein than most oat milks give you. Eat a handful of these foods across one day and you'll pass 40–50 g of protein before you even count the bread, potatoes, or produce, on a list that averages a little over six dollars a day.

Where the "vegan is expensive" idea actually comes from

If $43 a week sounds low for "vegan," it's probably because most people picture the freezer and dairy-alternative aisles when they hear "vegan groceries": Beyond Burgers, shredded vegan cheese, oat milk. Those products are real, and they cost more. That's where the "vegan is expensive" reputation comes from. The prices below are ballpark figures pulled from search listings, since Walmart doesn't have a confirmed product page for each one. Prices vary by store, so do a quick check before you shop.

Swap tofu for a Beyond Burger six-pack at the same amount of protein, and you'll pay roughly $10.55 more. Buy a package of vegan cheese instead of a comparable dairy cheddar, and that's roughly $4.97 more. Switch soy milk to oat milk, and that's roughly $2.41 more. Add all three to the whole-food list above and you've added about $18. That's most of the gap between a $43 whole-food week and a $60–65+ week built around the freezer aisle instead of the produce aisle. The same pattern shows up in a study designed to show vegan diets save money: the JAMA Network Open research covered below found "meat alternatives" was one of the only three spending categories that increased on the vegan arm of the trial.

Is vegan food actually cheaper than a typical diet?

For whole-food-based eating specifically, two of the better-designed studies on this question say yes. Researchers led by Marco Springmann at Oxford modeled diet costs across countries. In high-income countries, they found vegan diets came with a 21–34% cost reduction compared with a typical current diet — the biggest reduction of any diet type they studied. (Vegetarian diets saved 27–31%, flexitarian saved 14%, and pescatarian diets actually cost 2% more.) Springmann put it directly: "These diets could be better for your bank balance as well as your health and the health of the planet." One important caveat: the study only modeled whole foods. It left out processed meat alternatives and restaurant meals — the same processed foods that push costs up in the comparisons above.

Separately, a 2024 secondary analysis of a randomized clinical trial in JAMA Network Open tracked the actual food costs of 62 overweight adults as they switched between a low-fat vegan diet and a Mediterranean diet. The result: "Total food costs decreased on the vegan diet by 19% (−$1.8/d... P < .001)" compared with a standard American diet. Costs were also 25% ($2.40/day) lower than on the Mediterranean diet — more than $650 a year cheaper than standard eating, and more than $870 a year cheaper than Mediterranean eating. Almost all of the savings came from cutting meat (−$2.90/day) and dairy (−$0.50/day). That was partly offset by spending a bit more on vegetables, grains, and, again, meat alternatives (+$0.50/day). Both studies point the same way: whole plant foods save real money, and mock meat and vegan dairy are where those savings disappear.

The cheapest vegan protein, and other ways to cut cost

Dry brown lentils are the practical answer: $1.92 a pound at Walmart works out to roughly 58 grams of protein per dollar, and a cooked cup delivers about 18 g of protein for around 230 calories. Past that one number, a handful of habits keep a vegan week closer to $43 than $65 or $85:

• Buy dried legumes instead of canned where you can. A dollar of dry lentils is all food. A dollar of canned beans or tofu is partly water weight, a point our own high-protein vegan meal plan makes too. Canned black beans run about $0.86 per 15 oz can, which is convenient, but you pay more per gram of actual bean.
• Buy grains and legumes in bulk sizes. The 5 lb rice bag ($3.37) and 40 oz peanut butter jar ($3.98) both last well past one week, so the real per-week cost drops sharply after week one.
• Lean on frozen produce. Frozen mixed vegetables cost $0.98 per 12 oz and frozen broccoli costs about $1.00 per 12 oz — cheaper than most fresh vegetables on this list (fresh spinach runs $2.28 per 10 oz) — and they won't spoil while you work through the week.
• Save mock meats and vegan cheese for once in a while. The price-comparison table above shows Beyond Burger, Violife cheese, and Oatly oat milk each cost roughly 3 to 5 times as much as their whole-food or budget-plant equivalents. And the JAMA study found meat alternatives was one of the few categories where vegan spending actually went up.
• Pick soy milk over oat milk if you want a plant milk. Soy milk runs about $2.86 for 64 oz, versus roughly $5.27 for the same size of Oatly, and it has meaningfully more protein per cup — about 7 g, compared with the 2–3 g in most oat milks.

Do you need to budget for supplements?

Yes. Budget for a vitamin B12 supplement. B12 is a nutrient that's hard to get without eating animal foods, so vegans need another source for it, and it's a small, predictable cost. The NHS states plainly that "sources for vegans are limited and a vitamin B12 supplement may be needed," and points to fortified foods, like some plant milks, soy products, and breakfast cereals, as an alternative or addition to a pill. The Vegan Society gives concrete dosing: at least 10 mcg a day as a daily supplement, or at least 2,000 mcg once a week, or B12-fortified foods roughly three times a day if you aren't taking a supplement. It adds that "the only reliable vegan sources of B12 are foods fortified with B12... and B12 supplements." A basic B12 supplement typically costs only a few dollars a month, so it barely moves the weekly totals above. The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics' 2025 position paper backs this up: "appropriately planned vegetarian and vegan dietary patterns can be nutritionally adequate for adults." Taking a B12 supplement is simply part of what "appropriately planned" means.

Turning this into a real week

The $43.44 list above shows how low the cost can go, but it's deliberately bare-bones: beans, grains, and produce, repeated. Most people want more protein variety and a bit more food than that. That's where the moderate tier from the cost comparison above comes in. Our own high-protein vegan meal plan is a free 7-day plan, no signup needed, that totals $67.13 at Walmart for a full week, adds quinoa, edamame, and more tofu, and targets 80–90 grams of protein a day, with every meal and every gram of protein priced and sourced. If you're deciding where to land between $43 and $85, that plan is a reasonable middle ground. It gives you enough variety to actually cook from all week, and it skips the mock-meat markup that pushes the number toward the top of the range.

Which tier makes sense for you probably comes down to time as much as money. The $43 list rewards batch cooking: a pot of lentils, a pot of rice, and a few days of the same bowl with different vegetables on top. The $65–70 tier adds back some variety with quinoa, edamame, and more tofu, so the week feels less like eating the same three meals over and over. It's fine to buy a mock meat or a tub of vegan cheese here and there once the staples are covered. The numbers above don't mean processed vegan food is off-limits. They just mean buying it every week, instead of occasionally, pushes a $43 week toward $85 or more.

This article is about grocery costs and food shopping. It isn't financial or medical advice. Prices are walmart.com listing figures checked July 2026 (several flagged above as approximate). They'll vary by store, region, and date, so check current prices before you rely on any total. Calorie and protein figures are approximate, based on the USDA FoodData Central entries linked above. If you're considering a vegan diet or a B12 supplement, talk to a doctor or registered dietitian about what's right for you.