Grocery and recipe app comparison and review
My family has been using Paprika 3 for years to manage our recipes and groceries. However, there are a few pain points with the experience…
- Adding items to the grocery list is difficult: you need to open the app, navigate to the grocery tab, and type it in. Siri integration is technically available but works too inconsistently (admittedly probably not Paprika’s fault) to be reliable, so we never use it.
- There is limited integration with the OS / other apps. For instance, the only way to put a meal plan on the calendar is to manually export it. This adds a lot of friction to reviewing our plan e.g., at the end of day rush.
- Meal planning is entirely manual. Yet with 500+ recipes saved, it becomes tough to scroll through the options and select recipes for the days ahead. We tend to just do the same things over and over again due to our own biases, whereas more intelligent planning features might help us e.g., choose a random recipe out of all of the options that have specific ingredients.
I knew there were a number of modern alternatives out there that hadn’t been developed when we first started using Paprika, so I set out to compare the options.
# Comparison
| Grocery | Paprika | Mela | Crouton | Pestle | Julienne | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Special | - Superior grocery list management: inventory tracking, intelligent auto-sorting per-store based on when something was purchased | - Integration with
Combustion temperature probes - Hands-free cook mode (e.g., wink to move to the next step) is funny and maybe actually useful |
- ChatGPT integration for making/remixing recipes - Image creation for ingredients - Recipe suggestions |
|||
| Scaling | - Granular scaling - No conversion |
- Only in .5 increments - Converts metric/imperial |
- Only in .5 increments - Converts metric/imperial |
- Only in .5 increments - Converts metric/imperial |
Only in 1.0 increments | |
| Grocery lists | - Only in-app - Items have aisles that the app remembers |
- Integrated with Reminders - Limited in-app management, would probably need to use in combination with Grocery |
- Integrated with Reminders - Limited in-app management, would probably need to use in combination with Grocery |
- Integrated with Reminders - Limited in-app management, would probably need to use in combination with Grocery |
Only in-app, limited management options | |
| Cook mode | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | |
| Mac app | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No (only via universal) | |
| Meal planning | - Yes, in-app - Manual calendar export |
- Yes - With calendar integration |
- In-app, no calendar integration - + Offers “generate meal plan” and random recipe features in-app and Shortcuts - Calendar integration could probably be achieved with Shortcuts |
Yes | None | |
| Import/export | Yes | Yes | Yes | None | ||
| Recipe browsing | - Feeds - Browser |
- Feeds | - Discover feed draws from recipe websites you’ve saved from before | - Feeds, suggestions |
# Review
Paprika wins on:
- Granular scaling
- Sometimes it is very useful to be able to scale a recipe to suit how much of a key ingredient you have (e.g., 1.25x scale to switch a recipe for a pan sauce for 400g of steak to one for 500g of steak)
- Aisles in the in-app grocery list
Crouton wins on:
- Shortcuts integration, particularly
- Meal plan generation and calendar integration
Julienne wins on:
- Absolutely gorgeous UI
- Chat AI integration is interesting but needs work
# Verdict
We may trial Crouton in combination with Grocery. This should allow us to work with meal planning more dynamically while also giving us a better add-to-the-grocery-list workflow. Grocery’s auto-sorting per-store features should also make it easier to shop, instead of scrolling up and down a list while trying to find the items we’re looking for and keeping kids entertained in the process.
A side note: Importing groceries back and forth is tough. We seem to have lost the date we originally saved a recipe in the export-import process, which is a shame because scrolling through date-ordered recipes is a bit like looking back at our life through the food we were making at the time. I’ll have to find a way to restore that metadata when transferring across apps.