Food App of the Week: Recipe Cost Calculator

Recipe Cost Calculator
Developer: Recipe Cost Calculator LLC
Cost: $1.99
Runs on: iPhone
Website: www.recipecostcalculator.com

Whether you’re running a restaurant or planning lunches for the kids, getting your budget together is extremely important. The Recipe Cost Calculator aims to do just that, but struggles on a few points in its attempt.  Let me break down what this app offers before I get into the positives and negatives.

When you open the app you have the option to view My Recipes, Ingredients, Shopping List, and Convert Units. The recipe page can be sorted alphabetically or by category: Breakfast, Desserts, Dinner, etc. The Ingredients page also offers the same navigation, although the categories differ: Dairy, Meat, Poultry, etc. The Convert Units page allows you to find just the right amount through volume or weight and presents some very nice buttons in fractional measurements commonly used in cooking.

The Shopping List keeps track of individual shopping lists and recipes and offers a total cost on first look. Clicking on an individual list or recipe presents an itemized ingredient menu showing the cost of each tasty ingredient. There are over 400 preloaded ingredients with suggested prices and you can add your own (or adjust the price). When you have your shopping list together you can even e-mail it to your sous chef or husband. So far, this all sounds really great and helpful, but unfortunately it just doesn’t work quite right.

When I added a turkey into my shopping list, it allowed me to add it to my list at $0.99 per pound. It doesn’t, however ask me how many pounds I want. So when I look at my shopping list, it says my bill will cost $0.99 cents unless I manually enter the cost. However, if I create a recipe, it does ask me to enter the number of pounds and accurately calculates the total cost. Unfortunately, when I add the recipe’s ingredients to my shopping list, it reverts the units I need back to their default setting of, say, a single pound of turkey. So, when I look at my turkey recipe in My Recipes, it shows the cost (with other ingredients) as $20.64, but in my Shopping List, that same list of ingredients comes out to just $5.81.

When it comes to adding ingredients or recipes to one of the predefined categories (you can also customize your own categories), things work, but they’re a little tricky. If you just click “Add Recipe” or “Add Ingredient” without being in the proper category, your new addition will either be miscategorized or uncategorized.

You can make this app work for you by manually fixing the shortcomings, but apps are supposed to make your life easier, and in this case, you might as well pull out your own calculator. It’s too bad too because this app has a lot of potential. Hopefully the next version will fix these egregious shortcomings.

Toque Rating: 2/5