Automagic grocery lists for your recipes How many carrots in a cup of chopped carrots? Or ounces in a cup of sour cream? One of the pains of grocery shopping is that recipes are designed for cooking, not shopping. They don’t sell items in cups or teaspoons in the store, so you usually have to spend time figuring out what you need in terms of weights or items. Wouldn’t it be better if that was done for you?
We are excited to announce a new feature we have been working on for a while that will automatically check the ingredients in your recipes, convert those into items or weights that you would buy at the store, and categorize them by area of the store and whether it is a common pantry item or not. So for example, it will tell you that you need 4 carrots for 2 cups of shredded carrots or 8 oz for a cup of sour cream, and then organize these in a list for you.
We believe this is a first for the industry to dynamically convert regular text recipes and ingredients to items in shopping lists. It wasn’t easy, but using the hundreds and thousands of shopping lists items and recipes people have entered on Say Mmm, and a with a little fancy programming stuff (we won’t bore you with the details), we finally have something that we think works pretty well. It’s certainly far from perfect, but we wanted to get it out there, as we know it will save people a bunch of time from typing out everything, even if things need to be corrected here and there. Plus as we continue to update it, it will only get better.
As our users already know, it can be very nice to have a shopping list automatically added from a recipe or whole meal plan. Before, users would only have to enter the shopping list for the recipe once to be able to use it over and over, but we thought it would be even better if it was done for you the first time as well. Let us know how you like it, and stay tuned for more to come soon.
