Coles Simply Plant Based Meal Prep: Cheap Vegan Ideas

Vegan meal prep used to mean one of two things: lentils again, or a specialty-store bill that made your eyes water. The middle ground — convenient plant-based products at normal supermarket prices — barely existed. That’s what makes the coles simply plant based meal prep approach worth talking about: a mainstream range, at mainstream prices, that turns a vegan or flexitarian week of cooking from a project into a routine.

This is a practical guide to building cheap vegan meal preps around the Coles Simply Plant Based range, mixed with the pantry staples that keep the cost per meal down. FoodTan is editorially independent and not affiliated with or endorsed by Coles or any supermarket chain. Prices are estimates and vary by store. Product availability changes — check your local store.

What’s in the Range and Where It Fits

The Simply Plant Based line spans the usual suspects: plant-based mince, sausages, burger patties, nuggets, and a rotating cast of ready meals and dairy-free alternatives. Think of it as the vegan equivalent of the regular Coles meat aisle — not a health-food boutique, just straightforward swaps. The pricing is the interesting part: where specialty vegan brands charge a premium for the privilege, this range mostly sits at or near the price of the conventional product it’s replacing.

That positioning matters for meal prep because it changes the maths. A vegan week no longer has to be built entirely from dried legumes to stay cheap — you can buy the convenient stuff for the nights you need speed, and the cheap whole foods for the batch cooks. It’s a both/and strategy.

The Golden Rule: Whole Foods for Batch, Range for Speed

Here’s the budget framework that keeps vegan meal prep genuinely cheap. Your Sunday batch cook — the big pots of curry, chilli, and bolognese that fill the week’s containers — should be built on whole foods: dried lentils, chickpeas, tofu, rice, and tinned tomatoes. These cost cents per serve and they batch-cook beautifully.

The Simply Plant Based range earns its place on the weeknights: plant sausages with mash and peas on a Tuesday, burger patties for a quick Friday dinner, plant mince for a fast spag bol when you didn’t batch-cook enough. Convenience products are at their best when they rescue you from takeaway, not when they replace your cheapest cooking. A $7 pack of plant mince that stops a $40 Uber Eats order is the best value in the store.

Coles Simply Plant Based Meal Prep: Five Cheap Vegan Builds

1. Plant mince bolognese (6 serves)

Brown the plant mince hard in a decent slick of oil — this is the step people skip, and it’s why plant mince gets a bad reputation. It needs direct heat and patience to develop flavour, more like mushrooms than beef. Then build the sauce exactly as you would normally: onion, garlic, carrot, tinned tomatoes, a spoonful of soy sauce for depth. Serve over pasta. This reheats better than almost any other vegan prep.

2. Tofu and chickpea coconut curry (5–6 serves)

Press firm tofu, cube it, roast it until golden, then fold it through a curry made with chickpeas, coconut milk, and whatever veg is cheap. The roasted tofu holds its texture through days of reheating — silken or soft tofu turns to mush by day two, so firm is non-negotiable for prep. Serve over brown rice.

3. Sausage and white bean tray bake (4–5 serves)

Plant sausages, tinned cannellini beans, cherry tomatoes, red onion, and rosemary on a sheet pan with olive oil. Roast until everything caramelises. It’s a complete meal from one tray, it portions neatly, and it costs very little per serve. This is the “I can’t be bothered” meal prep that still looks like you tried.

4. Tempeh fried rice (4 serves)

Crumbled tempeh fried until crisp with day-old rice, frozen peas and corn, soy sauce, and sesame oil. Tempeh is one of the best-value protein sources in the plant world per dollar, and crumbling it into fried rice sidesteps the texture complaints people have about it in slabs.

5. Lentil shepherd’s pie (6 serves)

Brown lentils simmered with onion, carrot, peas, and gravy-style seasoning, topped with mash and baked. It freezes in portions, reheats like a dream, and nobody at the table misses the lamb — the lentils give it the same hearty, stick-to-your-ribs quality.

Cost Per Serve: Vegan Prep vs Conventional Prep

The numbers are where this gets persuasive. Here’s a realistic comparison of a week’s worth of prepped dinners (five serves), built both ways. All prices are estimates:

That’s roughly a dollar a serve cheaper than the meat equivalents — which compounds to real money over a year of prepping. Check your own weekly figures here:

Making Plant Mince Actually Taste Good

Let’s address the elephant in the pan. Plant mince disappoints people because they cook it like beef mince, and it isn’t. Three rules fix 90% of complaints: first, more oil in the pan than you’d use for beef — plant mince is lean and sticks. Second, brown it properly before adding anything wet; crowding the pan and steaming it is how you get grey mush. Third, season aggressively — soy sauce, smoked paprika, garlic, and a pinch of sugar do the heavy lifting that beef fat normally does. Treat it like its own ingredient instead of a beef impersonator and it’s genuinely good.

Protein: Are You Actually Getting Enough?

The fair question. A vegan meal prep built on lentils, chickpeas, tofu, and tempeh delivers plenty of protein — a serve of the curry or bolognese above lands in the 15–25g range, comparable to many meat meals. The trick is variety across the week rather than perfection in one dish: legumes one day, soy products the next, grains throughout. If you’re training hard or have specific protein targets, add an extra half-block of tofu or a scoop of chickpeas to your portions — it costs cents. (This is general nutrition context, not personal dietary advice — talk to a dietitian if you have specific needs.)

Storage and Reheating

Vegan preps are actually easier to store than meat preps — no one’s worrying about chicken sitting at day four. Most of these dishes keep four to five days refrigerated in sealed containers. The curry, bolognese, and shepherd’s pie all freeze well in portions; the fried rice and tray bake are best eaten fresh within four days. Reheat until steaming throughout, same as any meal prep.

Stretching the Simply Plant Based Range Further

You don’t have to build an entire prep around the Simply Plant Based range for it to earn its place. The cheapest way to use it is as a garnish rather than the main event. A single pack of plant sausages, for instance, stretches across four lunches when sliced thin over a lentil stew, where the lentils do the heavy lifting and the sausage adds flavour. The same goes for the patties — crumble one over a tray bake of roast veg and suddenly it tastes like something from a café, for a fraction of the cost of a fully plant-based build. This hybrid approach is how budget vegan preppers actually eat: whole-food bases (legumes, grains, tofu) at bulk prices, with a small dose of the range for the meals where you want variety without cooking from scratch. Watch for the range in the clearance section too — plant-based lines cycle through half-price runs, and the mince and sausages freeze well straight from the shop.