Apps
Food
Your recipes with scaling, conversions, nutrition and a cook mode; a meal plan, shopping lists and a pantry you share with your household; and importing from links, photos and other recipe apps.
Food keeps your recipes and helps you cook them, plan the week and shop for it. It's personal: your recipes belong to you, not an organization, and it works the same with a personal account. The people you live with can join your household to share the meal plan, shopping lists and pantry. Open it at food.cactive.com.au or from the app switcher.
Recipes
- Ingredients are read as you type them ("2½ cups plain flour, sifted", "2 x 400 g cans diced tomatoes", "For the sauce:" starts a section). Food knows the quantity, the unit, the ingredient and the note, so it can scale, convert and shop for them.
- Servings scale every quantity. Spoons, cups and counts show as kitchen fractions (1½, ⅓); grams and millilitres round the way recipes write them.
- Measures: show a recipe as written, in metric, or in US measures. Australian spoons and cups (a 20 ml tablespoon, a 250 ml cup) and US ones (15 ml, 237 ml) are told apart; oven temperatures in the method convert between °C and °F.
- Nutrition per serving is estimated from the ingredients with USDA FoodData Central, laid out like an Australian nutrition panel (kilojoules first). The page says how much of the recipe it could weigh.
- Diets and allergens: Food works out which diets a recipe meets (vegetarian, vegan, pescatarian, gluten free, dairy free, nut free, egg free) and which allergens it contains, using the allergens Australian labels name. You can also mark diets yourself.
- Swaps: ingredients with common substitutes (buttermilk, eggs, self-raising flour and more) show them beside the line.
- Timers: times in the method ("simmer for 20 minutes") become timers. Several can run at once; they chime when done.
- Cook mode shows one step at a time in large type, keeps your screen on, lists what each step needs and keeps every ingredient a tap away.
- Your cooking: rate recipes, mark favourites and press I Cooked This to keep a history with notes. Suggestions learn from it.
- Pictures go with each recipe. They're kept at most 2048 pixels wide, location and camera details are removed, and they count against your storage (the same storage as Drive and Photos).
- Collections group recipes ("Weeknights", "Christmas"), with groups inside them.
Importing
| From | How |
|---|---|
| A web page | Paste its link. Most recipe sites describe their recipes for search engines, and Food reads that with the picture. For pages without it, Food reads the page itself. |
| A photo or screenshot | A cookbook page, a handwritten card or a screenshot, up to four pictures of one recipe. Food reads them with the platform's AI model and deletes the pictures once read. |
| Text | Paste a recipe: a title, the ingredients one per line, then the method. |
| Melt Recipes | The account data file: recipes, with each cookbook as a collection and its sections as groups. |
| Paprika, Mela, Crouton, Copy Me That | Their export files, with pictures. |
| Food | A Food export (Settings → Your Data). |
Recipes from links, photos and text open for you to check before they're saved. Files of many recipes are saved straight away and listed under Import.
Planning and shopping
- Meal Plan: breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks for each day of the week, a recipe, a note, or a portion of leftovers from the pantry. Plan for Me fills the week's open dinners from your recipes, within your diets, the time you give it and, if you set one, a weekly budget (from what you paid on your receipts; what's in the pantry counts as bought), and shows the plan and roughly what it costs before adding it.
- Shopping lists: make one from the week's plan or from recipes. Food adds up the same ingredient across recipes (500 g and 1 kg of mince make 1.5 kg), sorts the list by supermarket aisle and leaves out what's in your pantry and the staples you always have. Tick things off as you shop; your household's ticks show up within seconds.
- Pantry: what's in the fridge, pantry and freezer, with use-by dates (Food estimates them from how things keep; change any). What Can I Cook? finds recipes from what's in, things about to go off first.
- Calendar: subscribe to the plan from any calendar app (Settings → Household), or put a week's meals on a Mail calendar.
Scanning the pantry
- Barcodes (Food for iPhone): Pantry → Scan, then point the camera at one product after another. Each is looked up in Open Food Facts; one Food doesn't know asks for its name, and your household's scans know it next time.
- A photo: on the web or the phone, take or choose a photo of a shelf, the fridge or your shopping. Food lists the food it can see with amounts. Photos are deleted once read, and each counts towards your daily photo readings.
Everything comes up as a list to check first: untick, rename, change the amount, the place or the use-by. Something you already have is added to it (tap "Adds to…" to keep it separate).
Grocery receipts
Food can read your Coles and Woolworths e-receipts into the pantry:
- From Cactive Mail: Settings → Pantry and Receipts → Add grocery receipts to my pantry, then choose your mailbox. Food reads only the e-receipts those stores send, and nothing else in your mail. Check the last 30 days reads the ones you already have, once.
- From Gmail, iCloud or other mail: Make an Address gives your household a private address to forward receipts to. In Gmail, add it under Forwarding and POP/IMAP (Gmail's confirmation code then shows in Food), and make a filter for mail from the stores that forwards to it. Food keeps only supported receipts sent there. New Address retires the old one.
A new receipt shows on the Pantry ("New from Woolworths, 12 Oct: 18 items"), with a notification. Review it: bags, gift cards and household goods are left unticked; Add puts the rest in with use-bys from the day you shopped. Add receipts without asking puts them straight in.
What you paid stays with each thing ("Last paid $3.50 at Woolworths" on the pantry and shopping lists), Shopping shows your grocery spending by month, and recipes show about $X a serving once most of their ingredients have prices. Receipts are encrypted for your household; delete them, with the prices, in Settings → Your Data.
Use it up
Use soon on Today lists what reaches its use-by in the next few days, with the recipes that use the most of it. Turn on Remind me the evening before (Settings → Pantry and Receipts) for a 6 pm notification when something expires tomorrow.
When you mark a recipe cooked, Save leftovers puts portions in the fridge (eat within 3 days) or the freezer (3 months). They show in the pantry and in the plan's Add, a portion at a time.
Cooking mode
Start Cooking shows one step at a time in large type and keeps the screen on. Use the arrow keys, swipe, or the buttons to move. On iPhone, timers count down on the Lock Screen and in the Dynamic Island. On the web, turn on Next and repeat by voice (Settings → Preferences) to say "next", "back" or "repeat" while cooking; it uses your device's own speech recognition and stays off where the browser doesn't have it.
Suggestions
Today suggests what to cook tonight and ideas for the week, each with why: how you've rated it and what you cook, what's in season in Australia this month, what's in your pantry and needs using, and how long since you last made it. Turn on Suggest by the weather to get something fresh on hot days and something warming on cold ones (from the first place in Weather).
Your household
Invite people from Settings → Household with a link (good for a week). Everyone in the household shares the meal plan, shopping lists and pantry, and sees the recipes the others share with the household (each recipe has Share with my household, on by default). Only a recipe's owner can change it; others can cook it, plan it or copy it into their own recipes. Leaving a household takes you back to your own.
Sharing a recipe
Share turns on a public link: anyone with it sees the recipe (not your notes or rating) and can save a copy into their own Food. Links in Mirage show the recipe's picture, time, servings and rating. Turning the link off stops it working.
Health
With Log meals to Health on (Settings → Health), I Cooked This can log a serving's energy, protein, carbohydrates, fat, sugar, fibre and sodium to Health's Nutrition. You choose each time. Health asks you to allow Nutrition first.
With other apps
- Caity can search your recipes, plan meals ("plan dinners for this week under 30 minutes, vegetarian, under $120"), make a shopping list from the plan, say what you can cook, what needs using soon and what you've spent on groceries, and suggest substitutions.
- Notes: save a recipe as a Notes page in one of your organizations.
On your phone
The Food app for iPhone has Today, your recipes, cook mode with timers that ring when the app is in the background, the meal plan, shopping lists (send one to Reminders), the pantry (scan barcodes and photos, review receipts) and importing, including scanning a recipe with the camera. Timers show on the Lock Screen and in the Dynamic Island. Share to Food from Safari or any app sends a link or text to Food's import. The Tonight and Shopping list widgets show tonight's dinner and what's left to buy.
Access
Food needs food:read and food:write. Every role has both, in every organization; someone in no organization has them too. Everything here is in the API under /v1/me/food (see Food), and its limits are on Limits.